I wanted to write this article about the Pro Tour focusing not on the event but everything before it. In game decisions are always clutch, but people often bungle the lead in and are dead before the event even starts. This article was started before the event and is more an example of how we thought about what we were doing. Spoiler alert: We did not have a good showing. This is how we got there and potentially what we did wrong.

Our testing sequence:

Delver

As the obvious deck to beat after Orlando, this was our starting point for the format. If you couldn’t beat Delver, you better have a really good reason for still showing up. Starting with the Gindy Stalker-Equip list, we quickly discovered a few things about the deck that made us fairly unhappy with it. The most prominent was how high variance it was. Your threats were all either 10s or 1s depending on a bunch of unrelated circumstances. Invisible Stalker and Midnight Haunting didn’t do enough without something to hook up to them; Geist of Saint Traft needed to sneak through to do anything relevant instead of just operating as a Hell’s Thunder*; Snapcaster Mage never actually killed anyone, and Delver was just as random as you could expect the card to be.

Still, Delver was a weeder test. If your deck didn’t do enough to beat them, only kind of getting there, you needed some work.

We really did not like Pike in the deck and opted to switch to all Swords. Pike simply didn’t do enough on most guys, while Sword actually let you kill them with a Snapcaster or through a Lingering Souls.

* One of the prime things we saw about the format from the start was that didn’t really operate like a normal creature. It just didn’t do a lot of the normal combat things creatures do and because of hexproof couldn’t be interacted with in any normal way. Most of the time, it was a permanent you could cash in for four damage at any point, like a Seal of —whenever you cast a removal spell, it dealt six damage to your opponent. Four damage for three mana is good value, but Delver was very threat light and often had to rely on a Geist to do ten or more damage to win. If you had multiples, this wasn’t a concern, but counting to twenty with him took a lot of work.

W/B Tokens

Ari Lax

Test deck on 02-19-2012

Standard

Creatures (6)

Planeswalkers (3)

3 Sorin, Lord of Innistrad

Lands (24)

Spells (27)

This was our other initial gauntlet deck. We started with Patrick’s list from the first article on it and just made the curve better. Elspeth Tirel was too clunky; Blade Splicer was too loose against Vapor Snag and other removal. Mortarpod was a clutch addition, giving you early ways to hold off the various one-drops, blocking Sworded guys that weren’t double evasive, and teaming up with Vault of the Archangels to give you real removal. Oblivion Ring started as Despise, but that card was terrible to draw late, and Ring helped shore up any issues with Sword of War and Peace. Hero of Bladehold got cut early, as we wanted to have no cards that let them profitably Doom Blade us, but the power of the auto win was a bit too much to ignore. You didn’t want to draw it often, but it gave you some easy-mode draws and helped in the Wolf Run matchup. Sorin was a four-of to start, but it was just a dude. Nothing super unreal, just did some reasonable work. In order to smooth out the curve and make room for Hero, he was trimmed down.

The deck was fairly savage against Delver, so it stayed.

Wolf Run Red

Wolf Run Ramp

Ari Lax

Test deck on 02-19-2012

Standard

Creatures (16)

Lands (26)

Spells (18)

Six cards. That is how much changed between the World Championship list and this deck.

-3 Slagstorm
-1 Shock
-1 Thrun, the Last Troll
-1 Green Sun’s Zenith
+3 Whipflare
+1 Birds of Paradise
+2 Huntmaster of the Fells

Upgrade the four-drops, linearize the deck slightly, trade out sweepers. The odd card out is the Zenith cut, but Zenith was very clunky and unimpressive while Huntmaster did something.

The deck smashed Tokens and was a lot better than expected against Delver. Nothing really new to talk about here; you are the same deck as previous Wolf Run builds, which were the same deck as Valakut before them.

Humans

I don’t have the list we used at first, but it was heavily based on Ben Friedman from Orlando. We had added Gather the Townsfolk and Thalia, but that was about it. Maybe some Loyal Cathars too. We quickly shelved the deck, as you didn’t have any real advantages over Delver or Tokens besides Hero of Bladehold, and in exchange you played a bunch of guys that sucked against Vapor Snag and didn’t have any real trumps over most Tokens draws.

We also hated Thalia. Too often it would hurt you as much as them or just die to a Mortarpod, Gut Shot, Whipflare, or similar card without being relevant.

Dungrove Elders

We started on a deck heavy on the Primeval Titan plan similar to the Dungrove Green decks of last October but eventually cut back to just two Titans, one Wolf Run, and one dual land because otherwise we were just a bad R/G Wolf Run deck. Besides that, we were basically the same deck as Todd’s because there just aren’t that many green cards to play. We considered Bellowing Tanglewurm but ultimately wound up testing with Overrun. That was a little too clunky, and we came up with Wild Hunger. That card did enough work at punching Dungrove through blockers to make us happy, and that was where the deck stayed for a long time. Just before the PT, we moved to Tanglewurm to free up room for the new innovation of Metamorphs, which were fine but not unreal.

I still like the Titan plan, if only to give you an actual trump in the mirror. Twenty-two Forests is enough. I also like little Garruk over big Garruk just to give the deck a bit smoother draws and a few more options other than just make guys and hope that’s enough.

The Brews and other dead ends

See last week’s article for the brews.

U/B Control was also discarded at this point after it got destroyed by Wolf Run just winning with Solemn beats and Galvanic Blast reach. We weren’t even too high on the Delver matchup.

We tried some multi-color control decks, but the threat spread in this format was too hard to cover. If you just had to target one deck, it would’ve been easy, but just handling Geist and Delver from the same deck was very rough. Once we switched Delver up a bit, even Pat’s anti-Delver deck from Orlando wasn’t doing enough. We kept the deck around as something to test against and dropped the issue there.

We also tried B/G Wolf Run, but it had no appreciable advantage over R/G. Grave Titan was better than Inferno sometimes, but Black Sun’s Zenith and the associated removal were much worse than the red options.

Delver 2.0, or the turning point:

We went back over the decks, looking for ways to improve on them. Token and Wolf Run felt very smoothed out, so we went back to the start with Delver. We wanted real threats that could win the game on their own instead of just trying to give Stalker a Sword and waaaahhhhzooooo people (again, see last week).

I added the guys: Porcelain Legionnaire and Phantasmal Bear. Matt went back to a list he had been jamming on MODO before Modern came along and showed people what a real format should look like and pulled out a gem: Feeling of Dread. You now had more ways to cheaply force through a Geist that conveniently worked well with your new early drops (unlike the phenomenal Sword Bear combo). The list tested very well against everything we had and solved a lot of the issues Delver was having with Tokens. More early pressure to punish their delayed start plus a few Falters was enough to punch through.

The more we played with Feeling, the more we realized we were on to something. Everyone was playing these board position decks, and we had just found Cryptic Command. The issue was that old Delver punished this list hard for playing the alternative beaters. Vapor Snag and Gut Shot absolutely embarrassed our Illusions and 3/1s that cost life to cast. Going back to the old creature set also wasn’t an option, as Feeling is a nonbo with guys that already have evasion.

So, Feeling of Dread was good, but it wasn’t a fit in Delver. Our other W/U deck had good ground beats but needed something to break through. You got chocolate in my peanut butter! You got peanut butter on my chocolate!

U/W Humans

Ari Lax

Test deck on 02-19-2012

Standard

Creatures (23)

Lands (23)

Spells (14)

I’ll come back to this later, but this list is what put me on Humans for the PT.

Post Humans Lists

R/B Zombies

Ari Lax

Test deck on 02-19-2012

Standard

Creatures (23)

Lands (21)

Spells (16)

After seeing the Magic League list in one of Gerry’s articles, I thought the concept had serious potential and tried it out. The core of two power one-drops plus burn spells was pretty good, but Faithless Looting was just being cute instead of killing them, and Sword of War and Peace with 21 lands was a joke. We tried Shrine of Burning Rage, but it just didn’t ramp the same way as in true red decks. This deck performed fairly well but was a little soft to Delver, so we didn’t pursue it much further. The deck definitely solves a lot of the issues the red deck had before with not having good creatures, and I wouldn’t be beyond playing this style of deck in the future.

R/G Pod

Brian Demars

Test deck on 02-19-2012

Standard

Creatures (26)

Lands (22)

Spells (12)

Brian DeMars started testing with us about a week and within four hours had our second best deck. The deck started off much more Poddy with all sorts of silver bullets and quickly moved towards a “just kill them” mentality. The deck uses Pod in a G/r beats frame as a way to blow them out on your mid-curve option and as a source of inevitability as opposed to your primary engine. We spent a fair amount of time testing bullet options, and these were the ones you wanted to draw even if you didn’t have a Pod in play. Act of Aggression is also as much of a beating as last year, if not more so because it lets you kill an attacking Geist by stealing the Angel.

I’ll let Brian take the reins on the deck outside this. The one thing I wanted to note was that we did consider Green Sun’s Zenith, but it was way too clunky. The main reason I didn’t play this deck was that Humans felt like it had play against anything, while this deck was a little loose against Sword of War and Peace out of Delver and Hero of Bladehold in general.

G/W Aggro

Jon Johnson

Test deck on 02-19-2012

Standard

Creatures (33)

Lands (20)

Spells (5)

@jjflipped, aka Twitter Random, aka that guy who got left behind in Ohio, aka Jon Johnson, brewed this one up just before the PT. The mana costs make me want to vomit, but it tested reasonably well despite this.

So, Why UW Humans?

Here’s the final list we ended up playing

U/W Humans

Ari Lax

Test deck on 02-19-2012

Standard

Creatures (23)

Lands (23)

Spells (14)

Sideboard

The concept here resonates with how our other decks got much better: smooth the curve and make the threats more uniform. Mirran Crusader, Sword of War and Peace, and Grand Abolisher all shine in specific matchups, but outside those scenarios they become miserable. Every time Crusader got Vapor Snagged, War and Peace got blocked by a Birds of Paradise, or Grand Abolisher was just a WW 2/2, it was miserable. I don’t want those cards in my mai deck; I want them in my sideboard. I can make my deck perfect games two and three, especially when game one I can ride the fact that my cards are just better than theirs most of the time.

In their place, we have things like Loyal Cathar, whose vigilance handles creature matchups and persistence gives control fits. We have Leonin Relic Warder, which hits something relevant in every matchup, whether it’s a Sword of War and Peace, an Intangible Virtue, or just a Sphere of the Suns. And we have Feeling of Dread, the one size fits all finisher.

Some card specific notes:

Sword of War and Peace: This card was also a bit too clunky to begin with. You are almost required to pay five for it because Tokens and Humans sport so many Oblivion Rings.

Thalia, Guardian of Thraben: Too often playing this card felt like I was trying to play around my own cards. Sure, it wrecks some people, and again we respected that with the sideboard, but the symmetry wasn’t broken enough to make me want to play this card to start.

3 Gather the Townsfolk and 2 Gideon’s Lawkeeper: There’s one tribal card in this so called “Humans” deck, and you want to ensure that Champion of the Parish is a Wild Nacatl as often as possible. We started on four Gather the Townsfolk, but it wasn’t really a card you wanted to see too often. Three was just enough that you never flooded on Raise the Alarms. Based on that cut, we moved towards more one-drops. The debate was between Lawkeeper and Elite Vanguard, and our first instinct was that Vanguard was better for the same reasons our other threats were set up the way they were. Lawkeeper was sometimes an Eager Cadet, sometimes good, while Vanguard was always a 2/1. The issue was that the difference between a 1/1 and 2/1 was so small most of the time that you barely noticed. Lawkeeper was either a 1/10 or and an 8/10 similar to Sword and Crusader, but the alternative card was only a 2/10 as opposed to a 6 or better.

2 Moorland Haunt, 2 Island: We wanted to always cast our spells and flashback Feelings, so nine blue sources was a little short. With Loyal Cathar taking a lot of work to actually die, Haunt was also a lot less active than in other builds. It might have been right to have twelve Plains, but not casting Cathar on two felt like less a lower impact issue than being cut off of Geist and Feeling.

0 Fiend Hunter: Feeling of Dread does a lot of his work, and with Feeling you want as many beaters as possible. Hunter was always on the brink of a couple getting into the list, but we always felt uncomfortable cutting threats.

As for the sideboard, I tried to write up a breakdown of how we crunched the number for it, but it didn’t translate very well. Instead, I’ll present the basic plans we followed for each of the major matchups. One thing you will notice is there is a lot less boarding out actively bad cards for good ones than usual and more boarding out marginally worse versions of what you are boarding in. The other is that Mana Leak comes out a lot, but it was mostly a placeholder in the main that was always solid but rarely super exciting.

Mirror: -1 Mana Leak, -1 Gather the Townsfolk, -1 Loyal Cathar, +1 Sword of War and Peace, +1 Dismember, +1 Leonin Relic-Warder

Delver: -1 Mana Leak, -3 Hero of Bladehold, -1 Loyal Cathar, +2 Grand Abolisher, +2 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, +1 Divine Offering

Wolf Run: -2 Leonin Relic-Warder, +1 Mana Leak, +1 Mirran Crusader. You probably want the last two Crusaders against the black builds over 1 Gideon’s Lawkeeper and a Gather the Townsfolk.

BW Tokens: -2 Gideon’s Lawkeeper, -1 Mana Leak, -2 Gather the Townsfolk, +2 Sword of War and Peace, +1 Leonin Relic-Warder, +2 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben

Tempered Steel: -1 Mana Leak, -1 Loyal Cathar, +1 Leonin Relic-Warder, -1 Divine Offering

Mono Green: -1 Mana Leak, -1 Gather the Townsfolk, -1 Feeling of Dread, +3 Mirran Crusader

The end result of this: a bunch of bad finishes. I was the only person to post a winning record with the deck. So, given all this prep, what happened at the Pro Tour? Why did we do so poorly?

The deck still had some of the old curve out aggro issues associated with it. Most hands had one thing to do with your mana at each point, making you fairly inflexible when something goes wrong. This isn’t always bad if your deck is linearly powerful enough, but Humans was just slightly short on that end. The high-end power of the format was still in the other decks, like flipping a turn-two Delver or playing a turn-four Primeval Titan. Secretly, Humans had a lot of midrange issues. We had tried to solve them by cutting down on the clunky cards, but it still wasn’t enough to stop you from being a tap-out sorcery deck at times.

Finally, Humans lost the big edge it had: not being Delver. People were giving up on trying to play control decks that could beat Delver and not Humans; Lingering Souls was an answer that covered both decks; and people were simply respecting the deck more than they had for previous events. I don’t think Humans is actively bad. It just wasn’t as exciting as we expected for this Pro Tour. I still liked this list over the Sword-Crusader ones and think Feeling of Dread is a card with a strong future in the format. It’s possible the right shell is a Delver-Champion one instead of a pure Humans shell, but the effect is definitely powerful.

I also played very poorly. Both my Constructed losses involved me punting a game with a marginal keep. Part of it is that I have gotten a lot looser with the hands I keep since playing Tempered Steel, which rewarded high-risk high reward hands. The other part was likely jet lag from flying in the night before. It was unavoidable this time, but in the future I am going to try my hardest to avoid it. I was basically unconscious during the draft rounds and made tons of mistakes trying to play my Esper control deck. Even as I write this I’m still operating on Michigan time and falling asleep mid-afternoon in Hawaii.

We missed the Spirits deck entirely, but that was mostly because of our philosophy on the format. Why would we want to play all three-drops and four-drops when we can play a smoother Delver deck? We just didn’t think about whether you needed to build a lean deck when you have trumps to Delver.

I don’t think this event was a complete waste despite our poor showing. At the least, I learned a lot about preparing for Pro Tours in comparison to other events. Maybe we played the raw best deck, but that isn’t always what you want for a Pro Tour. In a Grand Prix or lower, the amount of testing that is put in by the players is much lower and deck decisions are much more variable, which makes just playing the best deck right most of the time. At Pro Tours, people are much more likely to know about the “best deck.” Your goal is to either be the only people with the most powerful deck, or just go one or two levels ahead. I think our testing focused way too much on beating the field and not enough on getting a one up on the metagame, and that is where we failed at this event. Humans was the best deck against a lot of things we never would see, but we could afford to breed our decks to beat what actually mattered and ignore random decks.

I expect Pro Tour Avacyn Restored in May to be more focused on finding the best deck because of how new the set and format will be, but I plan on trying to think about the testing process a bit differently next time around. Of course, that’s a long ways away. Until then, I’ll probably focus on Legacy for Grand Prix Indianapolis with a splash of Standard so I’m ready to do coverage at the end of the month for StarCityGames.com Open: Memphis.

One last tidbit: If you are attending the Modern Grand Prix in Lincoln this weekend, play something you are comfortable playing. There are so many decks that can win, but they all are very skill intensive.