[SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE ARTICLE!]

Become a StarCityGames.com Premium Member and receive exclusive access to top-level strategies, new decklists and entertaining reports from many of the best players and writers that the game has to offer! This includes "The Innovator" & Worlds finalist Patrick Chapin, 2010 Player of the Year Brad Nelson, Classic Theorist Mike Flores, Hall of Famer Brian Kibler, GP and SCG Invitational Champion Gerry Thompson, StarCityGames.com Director of Sales Ben Bleiweiss ...and many, many more!

PLUS! StarCityGames.com Premium members now have an EXCLUSIVE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER sent just to them with the latest tech, exclusive content and exclusive deals along with unprecedented access into America's largest Magic: the Gathering sales database, and can view lists of StarCityGames.com's top-selling items - broken down by category, format legality, and rarity - in real time! When it comes to trading, increased knowledge equals increased profits - and increased knowledge is just one click away for our Premium members!

A StarCityGames.com Premium Membership gives you exclusive access to the best Magic: the Gathering content available and is an amazing bargain for just pennies a day! When you're ready to start getting more out of this game, click here to join StarCityGames.com Premium today!

If you are a valid StarCityGames.com Premium member and still cannot view the article, please consult this FAQ.

I haven't had a great year on the Pro Tour in 2011, at least as far as my own performances have been concerned. While I was one of the minds behind the Caw-Blade deck that dominated Paris, my own finish there—and in the accompanying Grand Prix—was mediocre at best. Despite Caw-Blade's success, I insisted on brewing up new decks to try to beat it in Grand Prix and Nationals without much playtesting support from others, a project that I felt like I came close on many times but didn't truly succeed with until many tournament opportunities had passed me by. I chose the wrong deck at PT Nagoya because I didn't want to play endless mirror matches and was punished for my assumption that the rest of the field would have realized just how good Tempered Steel really was. While I've posted solid showings in the back half of the year, with a Top 16 at PT Philly and a pair of Top 16 GP finishes, overall I haven't been happy with my results and came into Worlds wanting to do better.

Testing for Worlds this year really drove home just how different tournament Magic is in a world of constant events. Things just move dramatically faster than they used to. The combination of the StarCityGames.com Open Series and Magic Online means that playtesting for Standard tournaments in particular is a matter of efficient data collection and interpretation. There's so much information out there that it can be hard to keep up.

Years ago, it was possible to start testing for an upcoming event months in advance because everyone was working from the same information, and there were very few external factors that could cause significant shifts to which you'd need to react. Nowadays, though, the deck you were thinking of playing last week could be made completely obsolete by a new deck popping up at an Open Series event or online, and you'd have to start all over with something else.

Thankfully, our testing process took into account the accelerated rate at which information enters the system. A week prior to GP San Diego, I flew up to the bay area, where a bunch of us met up to stay in LSV's father's house while he was on vacation. We didn't have much in the way of decks assembled when we got there, but we each had different ideas about what we wanted to work on and a pretty clear view of what we expected the field to look like.

The Illusions deck was just starting to ramp up in popularity online, and we expected it to be a serious contender. All of us hated the G/W deck Martin won with in Hiroshima because it was so clunky and inconsistent, but it continued to be popular and have success online, so we assumed it would be represented heavily at Worlds. Similarly, we couldn't bring ourselves to respect U/W Humans but recognized that it was likely to be one of the more popular decks in the field, so we weighted it in our testing gauntlet accordingly. And Wolf Run Ramp remained the elephant in the room, even if it seemed to be fading in popularity—if recent years have taught us anything, it's that you can never truly count Primeval Titan out.

At the outset of our testing, the decks we wanted to play ourselves were all over the place. Wrapter was on Tempered Steel from the start, but no one else was really on board, particularly since his early versions were packed with things like Shrine of Loyal Legions in the maindeck. Brad and Luis kept trying to build various Forbidden Alchemy decks, trying everything from heavily reanimation-focused builds with Liliana to what amounted to U/W splashing for Doom Blade. My focus was on aggro-control style decks, including RUG, R/G, and Mono Red splashing blue for Snapcaster and Mana Leak.

I abandoned the R/G and RUG decks fairly quickly, since they didn't really have the tools to deal with the field we were anticipating—that field being primarily aggro decks, with a smattering of control and ramp strategies. We thought various white creature decks would be the most popular strategy (whether G/W or U/W), followed by Illusions, followed by Forbidden Alchemy decks, followed by ramp. The R/G and RUG decks I put together were just trying to do too much. Their creatures weren't good enough to compete with either aggro or control—green creatures other than Dungrove Elder and Primeval Titan just aren't all that impressive, though I did find that Daybreak Ranger was quite good against all of the white creature decks as well as Illusions. There just wasn't a supporting cast for it that made me want to play it in anything but a ramp shell, so I moved on.

The idea behind my R/u deck was that I wanted to find a deck that could use Snapcaster Mage alongside burn spells without a miserable manabase. I thought that by limiting the blue spells in the deck to Mana Leak and Snapcaster I could play something more like a 12/4/6 manabase rather than the dreaded 9/9/4. Snapcaster and Mana Leak gave the deck a bit more staying power and ability to deal with troublesome cards like Elspeth and Titans that otherwise give Mono Red decks fits.

I tried a wide array of configurations, but the R/u deck just wasn't working. The biggest issue I was having was that my creatures were terrible. Stromkirk Noble was okay but was easily outclassed by pretty much anyone besides U/W Humans. And all the red one-drops after him were even worse! I tried Spikeshot Elder, Goblin Fireslinger, Goblin Arsonist, and Reckless Waif, and all of them looked pretty embarrassing the moment my opponent played so much as an Illusionary Bear.

It was a strange moment when I came to the realization that I needed to shift the core of the deck to blue if I wanted access to better creatures. That's right—Delver of Secrets and Illusionary Bear are above and beyond anything that red has access to as far as aggressive creatures are concerned. Once I biased the deck toward blue instead of red, I started winning a lot more and thought that maybe I was on to something. The deck went through a few more iterations in Oakland, including cutting the Bears for Chandra's Phoenix and trying out Merfolk Looters to help draw out of mana flood. By the time we went to GP San Diego, I was pretty happy with the direction things were going.

The GP itself was pretty uneventful, as I managed to cobble together an unimpressive but non-embarrassing 37th-place finish after some disappointing results in the draft day. More interesting was the opportunity I had to watch Patrick Sullivan playing in side events with a Standard deck that shared quite a few elements with the one I was working on. The key card he was using that I had yet to try was Desperate Ravings.

By now you've heard Gerry and both Patricks—Chapin and Sullivan—wax poetic about Desperate Ravings, so I'm not going to go into too much detail about why the card is so good. The simple fact is that the card is awesome. It digs you deeper into your deck, helps remedy both mana screw and mana flood, and has remarkable synergy with anything that uses your graveyard as a resource. It's also an instant, which is a big deal in a deck that's trying to leave open mana for removal and countermagic. It fuels Grim Lavamancer as well, which is a huge deal against opposing creature decks. It was one of the big selling points of Merfolk Looter for me, but I was much happier to find a card that let me reduce my vulnerability to the Arc Trails and Gut Shots I was sure would be popular.

U/R Tempo Featured by Patrick Sullivan on 2011-11-20 (Standard) As written about in http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/23132.html Print this deck!
Maindeck: Creatures 4 Delver of Secrets 3 Grim Lavamancer 1 Inferno Titan 4 Snapcaster Mage Instants 3 Brimstone Volley 4 Desperate Ravings 2 Dismember 2 Gut Shot 2 Incinerate 4 Mana Leak 2 Shock	Sorceries 4 Gitaxian Probe 4 Ponder Basic Lands 12 Island 4 Mountain Lands 1 Shimmering Grotto 4 Sulfur Falls	Sideboard: 4 Shrine of Burning Rage 2 Dissipate 3 Flashfreeze 2 Negate 4 Arc Trail
Download this deck in Apprentice format!		Download this deck in Magic Online Text format!

I liked a lot of what Pat had going on but found the deck lacking in some areas. Specifically, the deck felt really slow and plodding when it didn't draw a Delver of Secrets early. I was playing against various ramp decks a lot in my early testing, and I found that they could easily wait out my Mana Leaks and just play a Dungrove Elder or something similar with three mana up, and I was usually dead or close to it.

I also didn't really like Inferno Titan much. While he was certainly powerful, most decks I was anticipating had either countermagic or something bigger to play, so I couldn't really afford to tap out for him. I felt like I wanted something that I could play earlier to apply pressure against slower decks as well as to help defend me against creature decks.

The solution came to me pretty quickly—Chandra's Phoenix. I was initially hesitant to play Phoenix because of the color requirements, but I found that even without a manabase skewed toward red, I could frequently cast Phoenix early, and even when I couldn't play it on turn three, I was generally happy to play it on turn five or six with counter mana up. Phoenix made the best beatdown draws that much better—Delver into Delver plus Ponder into Phoenix represented a lot of damage very fast, and even in those hands that Phoenix was my only threat, it could often get in for a decent chunk of damage to help get my opponent into burn range.

Phoenix interacts particularly well with Brimstone Volley. Volley is an odd card in this deck because you don't have that many creatures to suicide with, but you're never too sad when a Phoenix dies. I found myself in many a race situation in testing where I could leave a Phoenix back to block—sometimes to trade, sometimes just to chump—and then pick it back up with a morbid Brimstone Volley just to send it in for lethal the following turn.

The other addition I made to Pat's deck was Psychic Barrier. I wasn't a big fan of Dismember in a world that looked to be so heavily aggro, but I wanted a card that could deal with Hero of Bladehold and similar threats. Dissipate was an option, but the lower mana cost on Psychic Barrier makes it work much better with Snapcaster Mage, and the life loss is far from trivial in a deck with so much burn. Psychic Barriers let you go long against ramp decks while still giving you early answers against creature decks, and it's even great as a hard counter for Snapcaster Mage against control.

Here's the list I had ready to sleeve up for Worlds:

U/R Tempo Featured by Brian Kibler on 2011-11-27 (Standard) As written about in http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/23165.html Print this deck!
Maindeck: Creatures 3 Chandra's Phoenix 4 Delver of Secrets 3 Grim Lavamancer 4 Snapcaster Mage Instants 3 Brimstone Volley 3 Desperate Ravings 2 Galvanic Blast 2 Gut Shot 2 Incinerate 4 Mana Leak 2 Psychic Barrier	Sorceries 2 Gitaxian Probe 4 Ponder Basic Lands 10 Island 8 Mountain Lands 4 Sulfur Falls	Stats: Average mana: 1.08 Average creature mana cost: 1.71 Average creature power: 1.50 Average creature toughness: 1.21 Deck Composition: Basic Lands: 30.00% Creatures: 23.33% Instants: 30.00% Lands: 6.67% Sorceries: 10.00%
Download this deck in Apprentice format!		Download this deck in Magic Online Text format!

So, of course, I played Tempered Steel.

Wait, what?

How exactly I arrived at spending virtually all of my testing time working on R/U and played a different deck in Worlds is, I think, an important lesson in tournament preparation with a group. I believe strongly that the best way to develop good decks within a team is to have individual players working on decks that they want to work on and trying to make those decks the best they can be.

Too often in playtesting—among both amateur players and top pro teams—people jump back and forth between different decks, playing them for a few games and then dismissing them and moving on to something else. While that can be informative to provide an overview of the format, that's no way to actually decide what deck you're going to play in a tournament and certainly no way to end up with a good version of that deck.

Think of it like the American justice system. The idea behind the adversarial system in the US is that pitting two parties with a vested interest in the outcome against one another is the best way to bring the truth of a controversial matter to light. While there are many criticisms one might throw against the realities of how the system functions, the basic principle is sound when it comes to resolving contested issues. Unless the parties involved in the analysis of the issue have some kind of vested interest, the scales will always tip in the favor of the interested party.

What does this have to do with Magic playtesting? Well, if you're testing your brew against a stock deck played by someone who doesn't care about that deck, how likely do you think it is that you're going to get accurate results? How likely is it that you're going to have the optimal version of that deck? The player who takes on the role of the “house” during playtest games isn't digging quite as deep to find the best plays each turn, to say nothing of their commitment to identifying the best ways to improve the matchup.

Take PT Philly this year for example. When other members of the team sat down to play Zoo against Cloudpost, they'd play a few games, get completely blown out, and declare the matchup unwinnable. When I sat down to play Zoo vs. Cloudpost, I was constantly evaluating what was happening at the various stages of the game and asking myself what I needed to be able to do in order to win. Where others saw hopelessness, I saw problems that I could solve with Flashfreeze.

Now, that's not intended as a knock against the rest of my test group, but more commentary on the reality of the testing process. If I sat in on a test game of Storm in place of Matt Nass, for instance, I'm sure I wouldn't be looking at half the things he would be considering in my place because I don't have the same kind of vested interest he does in playing a combo deck. To get the best results from your testing, it's important for people to be working on what they want to work on.

The other side of that coin is that it's important for those people to be able to recognize when it's time to let go. I liked my U/R deck for Worlds. I felt like it had solid matchups pretty much across the board. I'd played more games with it than with anything else, and I felt comfortable piloting it against anything. But it wasn't the best deck. Tempered Steel was the best deck, at least among those that we'd found for the environment we expected. I hadn't played as many games with it as others had, but I'd seen the results, and the results really couldn't be denied.

How we got to Tempered Steel? It was the deck Wrapter really wanted to play. He'd taken it through countless iterations, from maindeck Shrines and Heroes to Spined Thopters and Ardent Recruits to Darksteel Axe and Chimeric Mass. He'd defended it against the naysayers and found answers to its problems until everyone—including me—was on board.

As for the event itself, my actual results in Worlds were, again, unexciting but not embarrassing. I finished 11-7, good for 54th place, after finishing 5-1 in Standard, a disappointing 3-3 in Draft with two excellent decks that fell to poor draws and equipped Invisible Stalkers, and an even more disappointing 3-3 in Modern, as my Zoo deck fell to one Storm deck and two mirror matches (for which I felt particularly well prepared). I can say with confidence, however, that I felt like my deck choices and my play was solid, and there was very little I'd do differently in retrospect. And in Magic it's hard to hope for much better than that.

Here's to keeping up that much next year—while still building the decks I want to play, of course.

Until next time,

bmk