For example, for Yu-Gi-Oh, the requirements for a deck is minimally 40 cards (I think...?). You can have 50 or 60 or 100 cards for all you want, but you must have at least 40 cards. So naturally, as a kid, I created a deck with 60 cards and felt so confident that it was a great deck. But I always lost because I never drew the card I was waiting for when I was battling against another player. That's because I had too many cards. They were all useful cards, but not in the circumstance.

The lesson I eventually learned is that more is not necessarily more. Sometimes a 40-card deck is better than a 60-card deck. With less cards, it is more likely for you to draw the card that you really need...

Unless that card isn't in the deck in the first place.

This is the part where I link to life like I always do. In a way, life is like a trading card game. I like to think that before we're born, our spirit sets up the deck. When we're born, however, all our memories disappear so we have no idea what cards are in our deck, until we start drawing them. Hence, it's kind of like a mystery deck. So, we kind of tossed ourselves into the ocean with equipments we don't know we have.

If we're lucky, the first few cards we draw are good. In translation, we're born with traits or skills that are suitable for our early lives - things like obedience, a natural talent discovered early, or confidence. But not everyone is lucky; some draw unsuitable (not lousy) cards right from the start. Let's say your first card is "assertiveness" and you use it, the adults are just going to perceive that as disobedience or naughty behaviour. And just like that, your assertiveness is used up.

From here on, you can either follow your momentum and continue failing or find a way to turn things around. You can be convinced that your deck is lousy or hold on to the hope that things will turn around. In real life, we call this "turning around" late blooming.

Linking this back to my Yu-Gi-Oh example, if we've hard a rough start, we sure better hope that we did a good job setting up our decks. We better wish we have the right cards(/resources) and didn't throw in too much rubbish. In the meantime, sometimes we draw wonderful cards at the wrong moments and waste it away or draw such cards too late. Maybe we'll draw "enlightenment" one day before we die.

What I'm trying to get at is that we don't know what cards we have, neither do we know for sure that we don't have something. We don't know the value of a card until we chance upon the right circumstance but we're always going to keep drawing new cards. The impulsive things to do is to throw away or use up cards which we think are not useful and regret it later on; the better option is to fully understand these cards and decide when we might need it. Sometimes, patience and strategising pay off.

We get all these cards on our hands. It's really up to how to play it. Do we think of how we should've set up our decks instead in the middle of the game? That would be pointless. What would help is thinking, being smart, and understanding.

Last year, I was playing this trading card game app on my phone called Hearthstone and I kind of sucked at it. My friend came over and taught me how to thrash the opponent. He told me what a wonderful deck I had and showed me that his key to victory was in making sure he always had full control of his hand. He used cards with effects such as "draw two cards whenever a minion uses heal" to the best of his advantage and withheld action whenever possible while the opponent impatiently wasted away cards from his own hand. And when the time was right, my friend used one card after another to completely destroy the opponent, which was only possible because he'd done so much preparation by waiting for the right moment.

So sometimes in life, we really have to think. We also have to always seek to draw more cards. In a more real-life context, if we try to be resourceful, we're in more control of our lives.

Now, let me move on to the second part of this post, which was what inspired me to write it in the first place.

What about those people who got the completely wrong deck?

What if a woman is born inside a man's body or a really rich kid really hates being a rich kid (they exist, okay)? I'm not going to pretend I really understand people under such circumstance and I don't think you should. I guess that's why we should never be condescending towards such people. It's so easy to be grossed out when someone changes his gender and it's so easy to look down on the "spoilt brats" who "always had it easy", but what do we know? We're not them. We can't ever understand for sure what they are thinking or feeling.

(The above paragraph is why I wrote the first sentence of this post - I emphasise that this isn't a rant)

Imagine you go into a trading card battle with a heavily offensive deck. You're all prepared to deal huge damage and thrash opponents in straightforward combat... But then you realise your opponent's deck is equipped to nullify offence. He has cards like "reduce enemy minion's attack to 1" or "destroy minions with attack 5 or higher". We might want to close our eyes to such misfortunes, but they do happen, and sometimes there really is nothing we can do.

Except to embrace them.

Sometimes we can turn a helpless situation around, sometimes we need help to turn a helpless situation around. Let me end this very preachy post with a quote from my favourite anime.