As I write this, I’m flying somewhere over the middle of the United States, on my way back to California for a single night before heading off to Japan for the next leg in my month long Magic journey. So far, the trip hasn’t been particularly successful on the Magic front, but it certainly has been great at providing me with stories to tell.
The story of my Pro Tour experience starts a few months back, when the first spoilers for Rise of the Eldrazi started popping up online. I have always been a big fan of Block Constructed, so I was excited to begin working on the format. I got around to setting up a Facebook thread of the usual suspects to talk tech, but ran into some snags.
Mark Herberholz was no longer qualified, and decided to hang up his wand and head down to Curacao, the island that has taken so many PT greats from us. Gabriel Nassif wasn’t going to be able to come to the States at all prior to the event, so he was just going to test with his countrymen in France. Michael Jacob intended to test openly, primarily on Magic Online. David Williams won the World Poker Tour Championship and was too busy being big time to test for the event, so he and Eric Froehlich were out as well.
That left Ben Rubin, Patrick Chapin, Paul Rietzl, Matt Sperling, and me, along with “The” Ben Seck, who joined up after his PTQ victory. A fine squad, to be sure, but one lacking in numbers and challenged by geography. Rubin and I live near one another, as do Sperling and Rietzl, but Patrick and TBS are each strewn across the country by themselves. This led to us not being able to play as regularly as we might like, which certainly had an impact on our testing.
Our Block preparation began where pretty much everyone else did — with U/W and Mono Red. U/W was the most popular deck online even before Rise of the Eldrazi, and Mono Red was such an obvious port from Standard that it was sure to be the default aggro deck in the format. These two decks gave us good benchmarks for aggro and control in the format. If one of our brews had serious trouble with one of these two decks, it had to be doing something seriously exciting in order for us to consider it.
From our testing, it quickly became apparent that Jace had a seriously warping effect on the format. An unanswered Jace provided such a huge advantage that it was incredibly difficult for most decks to come back, to the point that we started building all of our control decks in such a way that they would be the best at combating opposing Jaces. With Wall of Omens in the format, the creatures that could legitimately and efficiently threaten Jace were few and far between. We ended up with decks like U/B with Calcite Snapper, Creeping Tar Pit, and Abyssal Persecutors, along with U/W decks that splashed Black just for Tar Pit.
Planeswalkers weren’t the only cards that imposed such requirements for decks to be viable in the format. The Eldrazi Ramp deck had such a powerful long game, thanks to Eye of Ugin and the giant monsters, that control decks simply couldn’t afford to sit back and try to beat them in a traditional control fashion. In order to beat either the Jace decks or the Eldrazi decks, every deck in the format needed to be able to present a proactive stance, and needed to be able to do so quickly. To frame the issue in another way — in this format, the best way to control the game was often to simply kill your opponent.
This philosophy informed both our deckbuilding choices as well as the strategies employed to transform some of the major matchups. Conventional wisdom was that U/W was a serious underdog to Eldrazi Green, but conventional wisdom doesn’t always take into account the proper way to approach a matchup. Because the Eldrazi deck has inevitability on its side, the U/W player has to assume the role of the beatdown. Because the Eldrazi “when cast” triggers can dodge countermagic, the control player has to take a very unconventional line of play, using counters early on to stop mana acceleration and other seemingly low-impact cards in order to keep mana available to attack with Celestial Colonnades. This kept the matchup much closer to even than commonly believed.
As our testing time dwindled and the tournament approached, we became more confident in our assessment that the field would consist of U/W decks, Red aggro decks, Eldrazi decks, and Oracle/Jace decks, in roughly that order. We felt that the most powerful card in the format was Jace by a long shot, and the most powerful interactions were found in the Oracle/Jace decks modeled after Michael Jacob deck that Brad Nelson used to win the Magic Online Championship. We looked for ways to find an edge in the mirror match and to gain percentage against Eldrazi decks, which seemed like a rough matchup before sideboarding. This brought us to the idea of playing Black, largely for Ob Nixilis, a card which decks that rely on burn based removal have serious difficulty answering. Black also gave us Creeping Tar Pit, the best manland to fight Jace wars, as well as some potentially exciting sideboard options. The combination of Creeping Tar Pit and Ob Nixilis can be pretty amusing, since you can win games by just attacking a few times early on with a Tar Pit and then eat the rest of your opponent’s life with landfall triggers. This ability to deal massive amounts of damage seemingly out of nowhere kept the deck in line with our perspective about the format requiring a proactive stance.
Here’s what I played:
Creatures (15)
- 3 Lotus Cobra
- 3 Ob Nixilis, the Fallen
- 4 Oracle of Mul Daya
- 1 Rampaging Baloths
- 2 Sphinx of Lost Truths
- 2 Avenger of Zendikar
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (28)
Our final decklist suffered somewhat from crunch time in the last few days, and a lack of manpower to churn out all the results that we needed to figure everything out. We ended up with a sideboarding strategy against beatdown decks that we were happy with, but didn’t play enough sideboarded games against other control decks to find the optimal cards for those matchups. We ended up with a Summoning Trap plan against U/W, but if we’d tested a little more would have realized that the number of big creatures that plan required us to play made our deck just too heavy overall for the matchup, and we would have been better served including more cheap spells like Vampire Hexmage and Naturalize to fight over key threats at a low cost.
I don’t feel like we had the best deck for the event. I think Zvi’s Mono Green deck takes that honor. However, I do feel like our deck was quite solid. Perhaps my feelings are colored by my own results, since I went 4-1 in the Constructed portion, but I felt that barring a few poor sideboard choices, we largely hit our mark for what we wanted our deck to do. On top of that, the deck was an absolute blast to play, and I got to kill opponents from full life on turn 5 on multiple occasions, thanks to Ob Nixilis shenanigans. I wish there were more events in the format to see how things would shape up if the format had a chance to evolve.
That’s actually a subject I discussed at length with a few people over the weekend. I don’t understand what WotC is doing with the Block Constructed format. Two years ago, there were Block Constructed Grand Prix tournaments and a Block PTQ season. Last year the format was terrible, and it’s probably a good thing that it was only played for one major event, but this year the format was fantastic, and I think it’s a shame that no one else is going to have a real reason to play it again.
Not only was the format one that most players are never going to play, but the Top 8 — which was streamed live, as always — was draft. While Rise draft is a great format, and I’m happy that draft is a major part of every Pro Tour event, I don’t understand the motivation behind having the highlighted elimination rounds of the event be Limited. Coverage of Limited matches just isn’t interesting to the average player. It seems like such a waste of an opportunity to highlight cool decks and cool card interactions. Sure, players can dig through the coverage for the top finishing Constructed decks, but the deck that so-and-so played to an undefeated record in the swiss rounds is far less compelling than the PRO-TOUR-WINNING DECK!
The idea of the Pro Tour is to market the game and build excitement. What kind of excitement does the coverage from San Juan build? What is it marketing? There are no cool decks to go out and build and play in your next FNM or PTQ. There are no secret tech cards from the winning deck that you just have to get your hands on. All we have is an incredibly interesting format that saw play at a single event and is now essentially dead. It’s a shame. I have a lot of thoughts about the format and a lot of ideas I want to pursue and to share, but for the most part, talking about Block at this point is just a waste of time.
Rather than talk about a dead format any more, I want to move on to talking about the rest of my Pro Tour experience. After starting 4-1, defeating Mono Green Monument, Comet Storm, G/W Eldrazi Ramp, and going 1-1 against U/W Control, it was time to draft. My draft went somewhat poorly, as I ended up Green behind Ben Rubin as a result of some confusing signals, and Gerry Thompson went Green behind me despite the fact that the only playable card in the color I passed was a Growth Spasm. My deck was missing some key cards like Ondu Giant and Kozelik’s Predator, but I felt like it was passable at least. After losing 2-1 to Gerry in a feature match and getting mauled by a nice Englishman and his double Enclave Cryptologist and Lord of Shatterskull Pass, Ben and I had the embarrassing distinction of being 0-2 and playing for Day 2.
We split the first two games, with Ben playing in typical Ben fashion, which is to say very slowly. I mentioned a few times that he should speed up so we could finish three games, but never thought to call a judge, since Ben is a good friend. Our third game very quickly got mired down in an incredibly complicated board position, with a Lavafume Invoker and upwards of a dozen creatures on my side, along with a Wildheart Invoker, a Deathless Angel, and a few other creatures on Ben’s. At this point time was getting close to ending, and judges began hovering around our match, prodding me to make my decisions quickly. At one point I was trying to figure out various blocks and do combat math for the next few turns and I got a warning for slow play, which somewhat flustered and frustrated me, since Ben had to that point taken up the majority of the clock in the match. Ultimately, I ended up losing, and very easily figured out a line of play after the fact that would have won me the game if I’d been able to spend the time to find it.
I was pretty upset after the match, not with Ben or the judges but just with the entire situation. I felt like I would have won that match against pretty much any other opponent, simply because I would have called a judge early on to watch for slow play and things would never have gotten to the point that we were so pressed for time. I know that Ben was just playing how he does, and that the judges were doing exactly what they are supposed to do and ensuring that players make decisions in a timely fashion, so I didn’t hold anything against either of them. I told Ben after the match not to take it personally, but that I wouldn’t hesitate to call a judge on him in the future.
The lesson to be learned from this is that it’s your responsibility to ensure that you give yourself a fair shot to win your matches. If you think your opponent is playing at an unreasonably slow pace, even if they are one of your close friends, you owe it to yourself to call a judge. Calling a judge on someone isn’t rude, and it doesn’t mean that you’re accusing them of doing anything wrong. It’s just something that you need to do sometimes to protect yourself from bad situations like this one.
I spent most of the rest of my trip experiencing the San Juan nightlife. When you’re out of the tournament on the first day, you certainly have a lot of time to explore the city! On Friday night I hit up a place called Senor Frogs with some of my fellows who also scrubbed out, but they decided to leave much earlier than I wanted to go. I ended up by myself in the middle of a crowd who was singing along in Spanish to a live band. I didn’t know a soul and didn’t understand a word, but rocking out and moving to the beat certainly helped take my mind off my frustrations of the day. Saturday night I ended up with a much larger crew at a club called Brava, where the doormen wouldn’t let us in despite offering to get a table and/or straight up bribe them. We were standing outside as some of our group took a taxi home when we struck up a conversation with a group of girls who just so happened to be staying at the hotel the club was situated in, and they said they could take us in as guests. Score. Sunday night was pretty low-key, as everywhere we went was either empty or had a huge line and we didn’t feel like waiting.
I thought Monday night would be low-key as well, since we just planned to meet up at Senor Frogs again and it was closing when we got there, but GerryT had met up with a group of girls inside who didn’t seem to want the night to end, so we accompanied them to another nearby bar. There were a bunch of other Magic players at this bar, and many drinks were had, then somehow most of that group relocated to a strip club when that bar was closing down. At some point during that night, two of the girls who had come along with us ended up on stage — one of them not long after proclaiming how much she adored Tom Ross. It’s probably a good thing they all suddenly up and disappeared, because somehow Tom still ended up making his 7am flight. Oh, and I’m pretty sure the girl who was hitting on him was only 17.
Ah, the Pro Tour life. I love it so.
Next stop: GP: Sendai!
Until next time…
bmk