Sometimes, early in a work of fiction, the creator plants the seeds of things to come. An astute audience can pick up on these clues and see how the story is going to unfold before it even happens. The snow globe in Citizen Kane. The direwolf impaled by a stag in Game of Thrones. Chekov’s gun. It’s called foreshadowing.
What do we call it when it happens in real life?
Thursday night before the Pro Tour, I was lying in bed. I couldn’t sleep. In the hours before, I’d been sitting at the desk in my hotel room alone, shuffling a deck and drawing opening hands over and over. I had a deck list fully written out next to me, down to the fifteenth sideboard card.Â
The deck was an aggressive G/R deck I’d been working on for weeks. I liked the list a lot, and felt like it had excellent matchups against most of our anticipated field—Delver and Humans. In fact, I felt like the deck had a better aggregate matchup against such a field than the deck the rest of the team was planning on playing—G/R Wolf Run Ramp.Â
I wanted to play it. I really did. I knew the deck inside and out. I had personally tuned it through hundreds of games of testing. My main deck was basically what our Ramp deck aspired to sideboard into against Delver, packed with removal and Huntmaster of the Fells and Thrun, the Last Troll. If I did well, I could finally prove to the world that Daybreak Ranger is the real deal and not just hype.
That was what kept me awake. I wasn’t here to prove anything. I didn’t fly to Hawaii to “do well.” I came to win. And as much as I might have thought my deck had a better shot against the field full of Delver and Human decks that we anticipated, I knew for a fact that a dozen of the best players in the world were playing Wolf Run Ramp, and my deck was terrible in that matchup.
It’s a strange position to be in. I’d never play a deck in a Pro Tour specifically to beat my teammates, but I also couldn’t bring myself to play a deck that I knew couldn’t beat them, either.Â
In Amsterdam, I’d had to beat Louis Scott-Vargas to make Top 8. In Philly, I lost to Wrapter in that same spot. And in Paris, the only reason the Top 8 wasn’t completely full of Caw-Blade decks is because so many of us had to knock each other out in the final stretch. When your team represents most of the top players in the world, you know you’re going to face one of them when it counts. If I was going to win the Pro Tour, I was going to have to go through a teammate to do it.Â
With that, I made my decision and drifted off to sleep.
Is this foreshadowing? Who is the author of this story?Â
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.
               *****
I arrived in Honolulu in the afternoon on the Sunday of Dark Ascension Prerelease weekend. Most of the rest of the crew had flown in on Saturday, but I’d agreed to gunsling at a local store—San Diego Games and Comics—so I made the trip early Sunday morning. When I landed, half of the team was at the Pro Bowl, while the other half was playing in a Prerelease of their own at a store called Da Planet. That meant that no one was able to pick me up from the airport, nor was anyone at the house to let me in. So I did what any resourceful gamer might do in that spot— I took a cab straight to the Prerelease with my entire luggage in tow. I was too late to actually play, but at least I got to watch as Brad managed to post an impressive 1-3 record with his pool that included Sorin, Lord of Innistrad and Devil’s Play. Worth it.
Once the Prereleasing was done with, we made our way back to the house we were renting for the week and a half leading up to the Pro Tour. It was a pretty sweet place— not a beach house, per se, since it was situated in a cul-de-sac a bit off the actual coast line, but a sizable vacation home with a pool and, most importantly, enough space for our team of fourteen to sleep and game. Arriving later than the rest of the crew meant I had last pick of the rooms, which led to me ending up in the one with the window facing directly toward the sunrise. While the part of me that loves my sleep was a bit miffed by the situation, overall it was probably for the best since I managed to adjust to the sleep schedule I’d need to be on for the tournament early in the trip.
Waking up early meant that I spent quite a bit of time playtesting against Web (aka David Ochoa), since he was one of the only people actually awake in the morning. Most of the rest of the crew tended to crawl out of bed between ten and noon, while Web and I (and sometimes an early-rising Brad Nelson or Martin Juza) would battle it out over breakfast. As soon as eight people were up it was time to draft.
To say we drafted a lot would be an understatement. In the ten days we spent in the house prior to the Pro Tour, we did an average of more than three drafts a day. Since there were fourteen of us, that meant rotating people in and out of drafts to ensure that people got equal opportunity to practice. Ben Stark decided to record people’s match records to keep track of both the number of drafts they’d done as well as their performance. The idea was ostensibly to be able to identify who knew the format well and who needed help, but after Shuhei went 3-0 with three-color Thraben Pureblood Control for the fourth time, it lost a bit of its meaning. Ultimately, the list proved useful mainly to counteract any of Owen Turtenwald trash talk with a nod toward his 6-20 record or as a talking point for BenS to harp on LSV’s propensity to splash far too often—not that Ben ever really needs an excuse to argue with anyone about anything.
I do think that record keeping is useful in testing and is probably underutilized, but I think it’s much more useful to keep track of the relevant data than just to record results. For instance, I think it’s very valuable to keep track of what colors/archetypes people are drafting and how they’re performing with it, but not so much to just tally up how many wins and losses each player has. It’s much more useful for me to know that, say, white decks have the highest win percentage of all the colors, or that black only tends to win if it’s paired with red etc., than it is for me to know that Conley is winning a lot in our drafts, because even if I ask him about his results he might not be able to sift through the film of personal bias to identify why that might be.
That being said, the most important part of testing—whether limited or constructed—is getting a feel for things. Data can be useful, but data lies. In the short time frame available to test for a Pro Tour, it’s impossible to play a sufficient amount to produce a relevant sample size. Not only that, but not all of the data you gather is equally valuable. It’s entirely possible for two players to sit down and play a set of ten games with a pair of decks and get a result of 8-2 while two different players play the same matchup and get a result of 5-5 or even 6-4 in the opposite direction. Sometimes the differences are the result of variance, but sometimes they’re the result of gameplay choices and strategic differences. I hate when people try to talk to me about matchup percentages; what I care about is how a matchup feels and why.
We played a lot of drafts, and I didn’t win a lot. My record wasn’t among the worst, but it certainly wasn’t among the best either. I didn’t win much in our testing for Philly, either—I actually had the worst record in the house during our preparation there, but went on to 5-1 the draft in the Pro Tour. Part of the difference comes from experimenting with a lot of different ideas in testing, but a big part of it comes from just not playing nearly as well as I do in an actual tournament situation. It’s hard for me to muster the same kind of focus for testing as for a real event. I prefer to save my mental energy for when it counts. I was getting a feel for the format, though, and that’s what matters to me.
Blue and green went from being the best colors by a mile in Innistrad to the exact opposite in Dark Ascension, while black and red made huge gains, particularly in combination, thanks in no small part to Fires of Undeath. Additionally, I felt like black/white went from a fringe archetype to a potentially solid combination, though that opinion was not one that was shared among everyone in the house. The big problem with B/W in 3x Innistrad is that it relied on uncommons to shine, and while many of the best B/W cards in Dark Ascension are also uncommon (Skirsdag Flayer, Lingering Souls); a small set uncommon appears about as frequently as a large set common, so they’re much more reliable. Additionally, because Dark Ascension is pack one, you can know whether you’re getting them early in the draft so you can adjust your picks for the remainder of the draft accordingly.
But enough about draft. I like draft, but the reason I play Magic is Constructed. I know many pro players differ drastically in opinion with me on this matter— which explains why we spent so much more time drafting than playing Constructed early on in our testing—but there’s nothing I enjoy more in Magic than working to figure out a Constructed format. While Dark Ascension was sure to shake things up somewhat, we knew early on that the Standard format for Honolulu was going to be defined by aggressive creature decks. The only question in our minds, really, was whether Delver or Humans was going to be more popular.
The first deck I built, unsurprisingly, was a G/R beatdown deck, though it’s probably more aptly described as midrange than aggro.
Creatures (23)
- 3 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 1 Acidic Slime
- 1 Primeval Titan
- 2 Thrun, the Last Troll
- 4 Daybreak Ranger
- 4 Strangleroot Geist
- 4 Huntmaster of the Fells
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (10)
Spells (25)
The big new cards in the deck were Strangleroot Geist and Huntmaster of the Fells, and they each quickly proved to be excellent additions. The combination of Geist and Green Sun’s Zenith gave the deck the ability to consistently produce aggressive starts to pressure the opposing life total which proved invaluable against Delver in particular, since it provided a way to punish the deck’s liberal use of Phyrexian mana spells. Geist also made Sword of War and Peace dramatically better, since the ability to drop a haste creature and equip and attack immediately made the deck far more resilient to mass removal, to say nothing of the ability to do the same thing via undying.
Huntmaster quickly proved to be a power card. The combination of life gain and putting two bodies into play is powerful to begin with. Just the front side makes him a great answer to Geist of Saint Traft, since your opponent can’t really effectively stop you from blocking and trading with a single Vapor Snag. It’s the flip ability, though, that really puts him over the top. Against a deck like Delver that wants to hold mana up for reactive effects, it puts them in an extremely awkward position in which they have to constantly act on their own turn to avoid having one seriously pissed off wolf breathing down their neck.
One thing I learned quickly from playing with so many Werewolves was that it’s very important to have productive things to do with your mana when you pass the turn in an attempt to flip them. This makes equipment somewhat better, since you can move it on to a new creature before saying go, but more significantly means that you need to place a premium on instant-speed effects. If your deck is full of creatures and other main phase-only effects to impact the board, you risk getting blown out when your opponent can stop your Huntmaster or Daybreak Ranger from flipping or kill it before it flips. You want to be able to wolf out with minimal impact on your development, and the best way to do that is to have a lot of things you can play on your opponent’s turn. I even briefly considered playing Ambush Viper…but only briefly.
While most of my time was spent working on iterations of this deck, I tried quite a few other decks, though I abandoned most of them quickly. One that I kept working on for a couple days was a version of the Splinterfright list I posted in my last article before I left for Hawaii. The deck actually had a lot of promise, but couldn’t quite hold up against the more explosive draws from Humans and Delver, so I eventually shelved it rather than spend too much time trying to make it work. It’s definitely something I’ll revisit in the coming weeks once Dark Ascension is on Magic Online, though, since it was a hell of a lot of fun to play and certainly has potential.
My last version looked something like this:
Creatures (29)
- 2 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Aether Adept
- 4 Boneyard Wurm
- 1 Skaab Ruinator
- 4 Splinterfright
- 4 Armored Skaab
- 4 Ghoultree
- 2 Dungeon Geists
- 4 Screeching Skaab
Lands (6)
Spells (25)
The Skaabs got the nod over Mulch and Dream Twist because it was very important to have a certain density of creature cards to enable your Boneyard Wurm and Splinterfright in the early game, so you wanted your enablers to actually be creatures. Similarly, Aether Adept and Dungeon Geists give you creature control effects that are also actually creatures. The deck is somewhat inconsistent, but can be surprisingly (and hilariously) explosive. I had a number of games against ramp decks in which my opponent would play a Titan, and I’d take my turn and play three creatures that were all bigger than their Titan and proceed to stomp them. I wouldn’t recommend this deck if you’re looking to take down the next Standard Open or GP Baltimore, but it’s definitely worth giving a spin at FNM. I know I’m going to spend some time tuning it when I get a chance.
Once I abandoned the Splinterfright deck, I went back to G/R. I helped work on other brews that other people made, but focused my efforts on trying to build the best version of G/R that I could. One of the biggest problems the G/R deck had was its lack of an immediately impactful three-drop. While Daybreak Ranger is a very powerful card in the right context, it’s not exactly a brawler or a card that can help stabilize a board when you’re behind. I decided to take a bit of my own advice that I’d given Conley a few weeks before and try adding Glissa, the Traitor.
It seemed a bit strange to splash a color for a body, but with Green Sun’s Zenith, Glissa was a great addition. She could brick wall Geist of Saint Traft and Hero of Bladehold alike if she wasn’t removed, and could even hold off Titans in a pinch. The combination of first strike and deathtouch is extremely powerful—I came to wonder why Glissa didn’t see more play before. Sure, her color requirements are a bit harsh, and any deck she fits in has to go out of its way not to lose to Mirran Crusader, but her immediate board impact as well as her ability to provide long-term value are both huge.
My G/R deck shifted to look like this:
Creatures (22)
- 3 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 1 Acidic Slime
- 1 Glissa, the Traitor
- 2 Thrun, the Last Troll
- 3 Daybreak Ranger
- 4 Strangleroot Geist
- 4 Huntmaster of the Fells
Lands (12)
Spells (26)
I was liking the deck more and more and posting excellent results with it against both Delver and Humans. When the results of StarCityGames.com Open Richmond came in, however, I was somewhat concerned by the appearance of Todd Anderson Dungrove Elder deck. The deck seemed like it would be problematic for my build, since it had not only slightly bigger threats but also Metamorph to kill my Glissa, which is worse than Phantasmal Image killing Glissa since they actually get to rebuy the Metamorph out of the deal since it’s an artifact. Some testing showing that the deck struggled with Delver helped put me a bit at ease, but at that point I was starting to look for other decks that might look attractive.
The first one I saw came one morning when I got up to see LSV and EFro laying out a ramp deck. I’m typically not a big fan of ramp decks, since they tend to be easily disrupted due to having a massive amount of mana and very few threats, but this one had something that caught my eye: Huntmaster of the Fells. Adding Huntmaster to the deck really helped alleviate my biggest problem with ramp strategies, which is that they could do very little proactively to impact the board until they get to Titan mana. With Huntmaster in the deck, you could easily be the one forcing your opponent to react to you as quickly as the third turn.
Our initial testing was promising, but not quite as promising as I’d hoped. The deck seemed very strong against Humans, but only went about even against Delver. As we played more games and tested different sideboard strategies, I began to get worried that we were biasing our deck too much against the specific builds of Humans and Delver that we were using. Sure, our plan of Ancient Grudge and Thrun, the Last Troll was great against decks with Porcelain Legionnaire and Sword, but how good was it against decks with Midnight Haunting and lots of Phantasmal Images? And how good was the deck in other matchups? We’d only put together the deck a few days before and tested it almost strictly against Humans and Delver, and the Pro Tour was coming up fast…
All of those thoughts—all of these doubts—were on my mind that night as I lay in bed unable to sleep. How good was this deck, really? How well had we really predicted the metagame? Would we just run into a bunch of U/B control decks and get slaughtered?
I would find out the answers to all of these questions—and more—soon enough….