It’s hard not to write about a Pro Tour. They’re the most significant Magic events, and I put a lot of effort into them, especially San Juan. I know neither format is particularly relevant to most players, so I’m going to try to focus on the process and things that one can take away from my experiences with this Pro Tour to apply to Magic tournaments more generally, and focus less on explaining the exact details of what I’ve learned about Zendikar Block Constructed.
I worked with a large group Zvi Mowshowitz organized called Team Mythic to prepare for this event. The team included Zvi, John Finkel, Jacob van Lunen, Brian Kowal, Matt Ferando, Cristian Calcano, Gaudenis Vidugiris, Jamie Park, Alexander West, Stephen Neal, me, and a few unqualified contributors, including Tom Martel who LCQ’d in. We started working on block very far ahead of time, basically around the RoE Prerelease, so we had plenty of time to figure things out. It helped that Zvi is so talented. The deck we ended up playing was based on the first deck he suggested.
Before I started working, the group had suggested the first build of Beastmaster (which didn’t have Vengevines and had Bestial Menace), Mono Red Aggro, and a White Eldrazi Ramp deck. A few other things had been discussed, but mostly people didn’t like the other early decks much. They said Vampires hadn’t been working out. I decided to put together two decks other had liked, Red and Beastmaster, and two decks I wanted to try, a Vampire deck based on Bloodthrone Vampire, and a midrange White deck that just tried to play all the best White cards. With four 60-card builds assembled, I played all of them against each other. Beastmaster was beating Vampires and White cards a small majority of the time, but getting crushed by Red. Red was crushing Beastmaster, but had terrible matchups against both Vampires and White. Vampires were losing to Beastmaster and White, but was pretty good against Red, and it felt like they had the most to gain out of sideboarding. White was beating Red and Vampires, but had some trouble with Beastmaster, but sideboarding in Day of Judgement and Kor Sanctifiers would be pretty big.
That was my starting point, but I knew it wasn’t a very realistic gauntlet yet. I just needed to see how decks played and start somewhere. It’s hard when there’s nothing outside from which to pull data.
I knew the most important card that wasn’t represented in my early testing was Jace, the Mind Sculptor, so I put together a Blue/White list. My initial build had eight planeswalkers, and the only creature was Wall of Omens (notably absent were Sphinx of Lost Truths and Everflowing Chalice), and I was playing Treasure Hunt and See Beyond. My removal was Oust over Journey to Nowhere (because I had so many spells that cost 2), and Day of Judgment. I had a full set of Deprives because I was never trying to do anything with more than five mana, except play a spell with counter mana. That deck did very well, especially as I modified it. I realized that I didn’t like paying mana for an effect that didn’t impact the board, so I cut Treasure Hunt and See Beyond, and played 4 Spreading Seas and 4 Sea Gate Oracle. I thought there was a very good chance I would play this deck, since I liked my build in particular when I saw other decks, and I wasn’t losing to anything.
At this point I had only played 60 card decks. I had not done any sideboarding. This bothered me, but when I really didn’t know what decks would be in the format, it was hard to build sideboards. I’m still not entirely sure that it wouldn’t have been more useful to choose 15 reasonable cards and play all my games post sideboard from the beginning, but that would have been harder, and I just needed to get myself playing some games. Sometimes you have to make compromises to overcome your own laziness. Seriously. If doing something right will make it hard enough that you won’t do it at all, it’s probably better to do something wrong than do nothing.
Zvi built a G/r Summoning Trap deck that was based on being able to reliably hard cast all its threats: Rampaging Baloths, Pelakka Wurms, and Avengers of Zendikar. It also played 8 man lands. Game 1, this deck didn’t do anything, but my UW deck basically couldn’t win after the trap deck boarded in Tectonic Edges and 4 Seer’s Sundials. That card was amazing against Control, and boarding out the burn spells that didn’t matter in the matchup was also pretty big. Zvi seemed confident that he’d found his deck, and the rest of us should also play it. From here, we just needed to tune G/r Trap.
This is when I got to New York to test with the rest of the team. I didn’t really like the way the deck played, and Zvi won much more with it than anyone else. This is also when I started to see Eldrazi decks in action. Gau had a G/W Eldrazi deck, and the Mono Green Eldrazi deck with Skittering Invasions had just started to make an appearance in 8 mans. These Eldrazi decks crushed UW and G/r Trap, but they were very bad against the Red deck. We had no idea how seriously to take the Mono Green deck that looked like it could never win a game against Red. Would people really play that? It made some sense, based on my results. UW was everywhere online, and I would hate to play Red against all those UW decks, and as long as the traditional control decks keep aggro in check, the field is perfect to just play Eldrazi and hope not to see aggro decks. We didn’t have anything we liked now. We didn’t want to play a deck that just lost to something else, but that looked like what the format had come down to.
Basically it didn’t feel like the decks were designed to play against each other. They each functioned in completely different universes. In all the bad matchups, it felt like all of your cards (except for a couple) were completely worthless. The tournament looked like it was going to be pure Rock/Paper/Scissors.
Then we found Tajuru Preserver, which let the Trap deck beat Eldrazi. He was so good you often wanted to Trap into him. They couldn’t All is Dust you, and their big creatures could be chump blocked by plant tokens, and eventually you’d overwhelm them. With Tajuru Preserver in play, the Mono Green Eldrazi deck’s best plans were to kill it with Ulamog or fly in with Emrakul. If you had 2 Preservers, killing them with Ulamog meant legend ruling your own Ulamogs, and you almost never had time to win after that. Trap looked to have broken it.
At this point we tested Trap against Red, and determined that, while the burn spells were very good, we couldn’t play as many as we needed to have a favorable matchup against Red while having all the other cards we wanted in other places. The deck felt like it was trying to do too many things to me, and its draws still felt a little awkward. It had a great sideboard, but too many bad game 1s.
I thought about moving back to U/W. Jon Finkel had played a few games with my deck, and in the middle of a test session cut one Gideon and one Sea Gate Oracle for 2 Sphinx of Lost Truths. That change made a lot of sense to me. Gideon had been under-performing recently, and Sphinx of Lost Truths sounded like a much better two-of than a four-of. I knew how to play and sideboard. Eldrazi was still a problem, but I thought that maybe if I just maindecked a Luminarch Ascension or two and sideboarded the rest, I could cut my expensive spells, bring in more counters, and just try to make a million angels against them. If decks can only win by going over the top, and there’s a card that stops people from trying to do that, maybe that’s just where I want to be.
But at this point, I wanted to go back to trying Beastmaster. If our Trap deck wasn’t favored against Red anyway, what was the point? Beastmaster could beat most other decks more consistently than the Trap deck. I forgot to mention earlier that after I reported that Beastmaster was losing to our Red deck, Zvi suggested changes to try to save Beastmaster. Cut some Overrun effects (one of each) and the Bestial Menaces for Leatherback Baloths and Vengevines. After making those changes, the deck was actually beating Red if Red was playing Goblin Bushwhacker and Devastating Summons (unlike our initial build, which was better against most things other than the mirror).
We looked online to try to figure out what Red decks would look like. Results were inconclusive. It was hard to put a percentage on our matchup because it depended on how many burn spells they were playing, but we managed to find a configuration that was performing reasonably well against Red even when they had a build that was pretty good against us, so I wasn’t worried about it.
Meanwhile, Beastmaster was dominating slow decks the same way Red was. That only left UW.
At some point, Zvi was looking through a stack of Green cards for sideboard options, and literally found River Boa. Between River Boa and Vengevine, the UW matchup started to feel pretty good.
At this point, everyone was on board and happy with the deck. We had a few slots to work out, but we were generally pleased.
When we got to the PT, I heard people talking about Eldrazi a lot, and no one on our team heard anyone say they were playing Blue/White. We thought all along that MTGO Daily Events weren’t going to be particularly representative, and maybe the fact that U/W was played there so much made people realize that this wasn’t the place for U/W. If everyone had been playing it, everyone would worry about it, and there would be fewer of the good matchups and more of the bad matchups.
In our last minute discussions of how exactly to build our sideboard, I ended up with only 3 River Boas in my 75, which I feel was a huge mistake. I went 1-3 against UW in the tournament, and the matchup felt pretty rough. Overall, I can’t complain too much about the deck I ended up with, since it was the exact list, card for card as Noah Schwartz’s 10-0 deck. (I even wrote my list and his list at the same time, writing a card on one decklist and then the other.)
I know that the 14 people playing our list won 69% of their matches Day 1, and I know that Monument Green decks in the tournament in general won 66% of their matches if you discount mirrors. I’m confident we played the best archetype, and reasonably certain we had the best build.
That said, it just didn’t work out for me. I only won 4 matches in Constructed, and found my back against the wall going into the Limited portion. I mulliganed a lot, and I drew several Monuments in a lot of games, and I had a lot of awkward keeps – the kind where you ask people if they’d keep the hand after, and the answer is always, “yeah, you have to, but you’re not happy about it,” and then they just didn’t get there. I didn’t love our final sideboarding plan against UW, and I’m not sure I was strategically approaching the matchup correctly, but I’m also not convinced any of that would have mattered. (Note that I love to take blame for my losses myself, and generally, when I lose tournaments, it makes me feel good about how skill intensive Magic is, because I feel like if I had just been a little better, I would have made a different play and been live – this time I just didn’t feel like the cards were there.)
Anyway, as good as my Constructed preparation was, I think my Limited preparation was even better.
I was able to get a ton of drafts in with very good players before the set came out online. I lost early, experimenting with different archetypes, and eventually figured out how each of the decks worked. I opened my drafting up and just tried to play what was coming to me, and I stopped losing. When the set came out online, it felt like no one had any idea what they were doing. I was getting passed cards much later than I would ever see them in our physical drafts. I continued to draft daily throughout my block preparation. In New York I’d go to Zvi’s apartment in the day to test Constructed, and then go back to Gau’s, where I was staying, to draft online late at night, discussing picks with Alexander West, who was staying with me. At Grand Prix: Washington I spoke with Ben Stark, who told me about how he drafts the set, which was the formula he taught the rest of his house in Puerto that lead them to a combined 22-2 record in Limited on Day 1. I had time to experiment with it, and I didn’t like to push it as hard as he was suggesting, but he had some useful thoughts about the format. In general, I think Ben Stark is one of my favorite people to share a discussion on Limited. He’s not only skilled, but also unusually articulate. I’d recommend taking what you can from him fairly seriously.
I’d had the best results in periods where I was trying to read signals and stay open. I’d often find myself doing well with some deck, and then preferring it, and the stronger that preference got, the less I’d win, so for the PT, I just wanted to try to read the drafts, which is why I ended up abandoning my first pick in both drafts. The most valuable thing I think I got out of all my practice was just seeing all the synergies in the set (which run very deep) so that I could have the best chances of finding a cohesive deck.
Tomorrow I fly to Japan, where I’ll be diving into Standard for back-to-back GPs. I’m looking forward to being able to discuss Standard from a more informed standpoint again, and I hope to have a successful GP: Sendai report!
Thanks for reading…
Sam