This will be my final daily article, and it’s been a real blast. I’m not just saying that. Seriously, doing this series was one of the hardest and more enjoyable experiences of recent memory, and certainly one of my best as a writer. And the experience confirmed a notion that I had going into this: writing an article a day for a week is really hard. Especially when you get a stomach bug after a certain Aussie prepares a chicken dinner for you. (I’m sure TBS wasn’t responsible for me getting ill, which by the way was the reason for the delay of the previous article, but the point is that he’ll read the above sentence and get mad). [Just do what Kibler does and threaten him with the INS… - Knut] To anyone out there in readerland who is getting badgered by a certain editor to do a daily column, trust me, it ain’t easy.

My first four columns dealt with strategy, basically broken down into two separate but equal halves: How Bad I am at Magic, and How Bad I am at Drafting. I’m going to step back from that sort of article this time, and transition myself into the role of most internet writers after they write a few articles: Bitcher and Moaner. Hopefully I’ve earned a little bit of liberty to do this sort of thing, and I promise it won’t become a recurring habit in the event that I write articles in the future. But there has been a certain announcement that has really bothered me ever since I heard it: the end of Team Limited, to be replaced with Team Constructed.

I don’t know exactly why Wizards decided to make go in this direction, I guess it goes along with the general phasing out of Rochester Draft as a format. Maybe Team Limited was too much work on a Pro Tour scale. Maybe they decided that PTQ level players just prefer Constructed to Limited. In any case, the move has been made, and I am stunned and upset by the change.

Part of this is selfish. For as little success as I’ve had in individual tournaments, I’ve had more than my share of success in Team Limited. I’ve played in four GPs, never finishing out of the money and came in second once. In four team Pro Tours, I’ve placed 9th on two separate occasions. Not overwhelming, but not shabby either. I don’t see myself being able to replicate that reasonable level of success in Constructed, since I’m naturally weaker at it. But even if I knew that I would, I still would dislike the change tremendously. First of all, Team Constructed just seems atrocious. If you took a format like Standard, coming up with three decks that didn’t overlap in cards would be really easy. You would have your Tooth and Nail deck, your Red deck, and some sort of Blue or Black or White deck. Pretty straightforward. The only decision making process would be how to divvy up cards like Pithing Needle, Oblivion Stone, Jitte, and so on, but that sort of decision making process pales in comparison to the complexity offered by Team Sealed, not to even mention Team Rochester.

For as much flack as Team Sealed gets, it’s actually one of the most skill intensive formats, probably only eclipsed by Team Rochester and Booster Draft. Very few card pools build themselves; usually there are several viable iterations of even the most obvious looking of pools. Assuming all players are two colors, that makes a minimum of one color that has to be split between two players. Also, given the amount of product distributed, all three decks usually have more than 22 or 23 playable cards for each deck. That leads to a lot of decision making that involves mana curve, matchups, plugging up holes, increasing synergy, and lots of other aspects that get overlooked since anything tagged “Sealed” is often assumed to be devoid of skill. Even the most irrelevant of decisions often can make the decision between winning and losing (“I need to take that Yamabushi’s Storm for my sideboard because my deck has a tougher time handling a fear rat.”). While Team Sealed is often criticized because matchups matter so much, think about how much worse it’s going to be when Team Constructed replaces it.

The biggest problem that I have is that, quite simply, Team Rochester draft is the most difficult and skill intensive format ever. By a longshot. The amount of time it takes to handle signaling and communication well enough to do it under the pressure and time constraints of a Pro Tour is daunting enough, not to even mention the time it takes to come up with a good understanding of the format and a draft strategy, which can literally take hundreds of hours. The last couple of years I have been privy to the TOGIT testing before the Team PT, and the roster of names that flew to NJ to test is staggering: All of TOGIT, Phoenix Foundation, the various Dutch squads (including the champion team two years ago, Von Dutch), Rich Hoaen, Sam Gomersall, and a bunch of other very good players I’m forgetting all spent weeks drafting full time, 7 days a week. The reason that the best teams and players committed themselves like this is because it’s necessary to learn the format well enough. Even after all this testing, there was still no consensus of overall strategy, matchups, or positioning. The sheer depth of a Rochester format, even a very bad one (CCB, for example) is something that is just unmatched in any other format of Magic, Limited or Constructed.

Because of the complexity of the team format, quite often in Team PT history teams have risen above the sum of their parts by understanding the format and each other. The team format has often been dominated by teams who were all local to each other, who had been friends for a long time, and who tested the format a ton: Phoenix Foundation, The Brockafellas, Car Acrobatic Team, Slay Pillage Gerard, various Japanese dot.com iterations, and so on. On the flip side, various PT mercenary teams (teams comprised of players with enough pro points but who didn’t test and lived far away from each other) often struggled, finishing much lower than their individual talent would warrant. The whole team format is an entirely different animal when three players can just put together a Constructed deck and give it a go. This is a bit of an understatement, because of course you can test Constructed formats pretty diligently, but they simply don’t offer the same breath and depth as Team Rochester.

Lastly, I think Team Constructed devalues the “Team” concept dramatically. To win at Team Limited, you have to be completely in tune with your team. From communicating well, understanding each others likes and dislikes, signaling properly during drafts, building sealed decks in the allotted time, all of this requires a truly functioning team to work. On the other hand, Team Constructed is just three people playing their separate matches. Think of it this way: Let’s say that for a Constructed tournament, every player was locked in a room, by themselves, until pairings were announced. Then, you would walk into a separate room, play your match against your opponent, and then return to your locked room. You could do this exact same thing with Team Constructed and you would never know the difference, except that you would be completely unaware of your team’s record until the end of the day. The fact that you aren’t forced to interact at all as a team once the tournament actually starts makes me think that the term “Team Constructed” is a bit of a misnomer.

Team Limited is my pet, my baby, and I’m very sad to see it go. The enjoyment of working as a team, the thrill of a Pro Tour Team Rochester Draft, spending countless hours trying to crack the draft format, I’ll miss these all tremendously. However, by axing Team Limited, not only are they killing my favorite format, but I think they are removing the format that most symbolizes the good things about the PT: difficulty, camaraderie, pressure (think playing a match of Magic for a few thousand dollars is tough, try it when it’s not just your thousands of dollars, but your friends’ thousands of dollars as well), and the little edges making the difference. While some may celebrate the passing of Team Limited, I will mourn its passing for a very long time.

Thanks again to everyone who read my articles and wrote feedback, even if it was negative or critical. Just knowing that people care enough to respond makes a big difference.