It’s hard to take much out of this Pro Tour at first glance. I think the deck I played was fine, but nothing special, as was my 3-2 performance, and at first it felt like there wasn’t a lot I could do about the losses in Limited to miss Day 2. This is a Pro Tour, so I have to assume I would be robbing myself of valuable lessons to dismiss the tournament that easily.
I did not go into this Constructed format with a clear understanding of exactly how every matchup played out, what cards mattered, how to sideboard, and what my game plan was. This is to say that I did not deserve to win the Constructed portion. On the other hand, given the recent GPs and the newness of the format, I think most players were similarly unprepared, so very few people really deserved to win. I felt like I had a chance… not that that’s a good way to approach this.
I had done some testing in Madison early to try to figure out what decks we liked. Like many people, I tried to build some control decks and wasn’t too happy with the results. I believed that some form of Jund Cascade was the best deck, but I wouldn’t have predicted the results of the Magic Online Championships tournament. As I had been told, all the decks in the format really were more or less the same thing.
I didn’t really know what to do with that. It looked like Jund was so clearly the best deck that a reasonable option would be to figure out what the mirror was about and build a Jund deck that beat the other Jund decks, but I wasn’t sure that that was the best thing to do, nor was I really sure how to do that.
Fortunately, in Seattle Shuhei told me he wanted to test together on Monday, so I figured maybe he would know something I didn’t, seeing as how he’s much better than I am. When I got to his room, Saito and Yuuya were building decks to play against each other, and Saito, who seemed a little confused that I was there, immediately told me some things were secret. That was really awkward, as I hadn’t made arrangements to continue to work with them. I was planning to work with other people, and now I couldn’t really progress from the best information that I had. Still, I didn’t have much of a choice, so I agreed as long as I could work on with the people I was actually staying with, which he said was okay.
He asked if I had decks to test, and I didn’t. I was nowhere near where he was in understanding this format (he’s amazing, by the way). He told me to build some, but I was very much at a loss. I didn’t know what was good. I struggled to throw out some ideas of decks I’d seen, but they were bad and I knew they were bad, and when he asked why I was bringing them up, I didn’t really have much to say. He said he didn’t have time to waste on ideas that weren’t going anywhere, which is clearly the correct approach. The whole situation was both extremely informative and extremely awkward. Saito said he never worked with English speakers because the language barrier made it too hard to be useful. I had a chance to try to get through that, but I was woefully unprepared.
As I had little to nothing to bring to the table – they basically proceeded without me – but from the testing I had seen, his Green/White deck looked amazing. Buying that list from him was a strong possibility. In the meantime, Mike Hron met up with us in our hotel room, and said that he was just planning to play a cascade list that Neil Reeves had given him. He told us that Neil had been doing extremely well with it, so we tried it out. I liked how it played against other Jund decks, and I liked the potential customizability of the sideboard, since you could tune the deck to always Cascade to hit certain sideboard cards, it seemed like it probably got a lot more value out of its sideboard than other decks. This would be more valuable if I knew exactly what plan I wanted against all the different decks I might face, but I liked the idea enough that I figured I could just try to figure it out on the fly.
Gaudenis and Brian Kowal bought the list from Saito, which I probably should have done, as I felt that it was awesome and that most people wouldn’t be prepared, but I think it was just too far from my comfort zone and I preferred the feel of the cascade deck for some reason. I felt like both decks were better than the first level decks that were out there.
The primary lessons from all of this are mostly related to tournament preparation. First, I was really impressed with how Saito tested. It was nothing new, nothing you haven’t already read about, but it was just very smoothly executed. He had the relevant decks built out of real cards (with a few proxies where needed), and he played them in 10 game sets against each other, recording the results and trying different cards in one of the decks between each set. They played through sets quickly and seemed to learn a lot from each game. Every half hour their deck seemed like it had noticeably improved.
Second, it helped confirm my own feelings on working with people for events. I like to talk to people. I like to hear from as many different groups as possible or I’ll always convince myself that I’m probably missing something. Also, I feel like there are so many people in any given event that exchanging information with anyone is almost always best for both people, even if you’re just getting a better feel for how far behind most players are.
In other areas of my life, I try to avoid secrets as much as possible. I just hate knowing things I can’t share. I don’t like having secrets in Magic anymore than I do anywhere else. Some time ago, Patrick Chapin asked me who in the world I would most like to work with. At the time, I said I didn’t know, as I haven’t tried working with enough different people, and really didn’t know enough about how most players work. At this point, I’m convinced that the question just isn’t relevant for me. I want to work with anyone I respect who won’t care that I talk to other people as well. I want to play games with friends and on Magic Online to get a feel for formats and decks, and then talk to whomever about these things without eliminating future options. This is just my take, but the popular model of teams preparing for events doesn’t really work for me.
As for the Limited portion, I’ve felt that my Constructed game has far surpassed my Limited game in the last year. As a result of that, and just not playing as much Limited because of my focus on Constructed, I have no confidence in this Limited format at the moment. It’s likely that the lack of confidence is far, far worse for me than any actual lack of skill, knowledge, or experience. I don’t know exactly why this is, but I do know that I tend to have streaky performance, in which I’ll run really well or really badly, and results of major tournaments indicate that this happens to other players as well. Maybe that’s just because you keep winning when you understand things well, and lose when you don’t, but often it’s pretty clear that nothing like that has really changed, and I can’t find anything to attribute it to other than attitude and confidence.
Anyway, I started my draft by taking Bull Cerodon over Oblivion Ring, and I think it’s reasonably likely that I made the exact mistake I made in Kyoto of taking a card that used to be a better first pick, but is now worse. From there I took Stoic Angel and built a four-color no-Black midrange deck that had reasonable mana and power level, but no particular plan. I mulliganed every game, drew pretty poorly, and lost my first two matches in four games before getting a bye in the last round to earn the third Pro Point (thanks for dropping, whoever you were). I knew my deck was nothing special, but I didn’t expect things to go that poorly. Still, I needed to prepare more, particularly more recently before the tournament. (I drafted a lot when Alara Reborn came out, but didn’t draft in the two weeks before the PT because I was worried about Constructed. The result was that I felt like I’d fallen way behind.) It was like failing to review the material in a class before the final exam.
I’m really looking forward to the focus on Limited from this point forward (all the GPs are Limited), as I expect it to allow me to really focus on my Limited game. I plan to try to draft at least twice a day and I hope to find a way to take useful notes and examine my progress in a usefully critical way. I’m optimistic about these next few months really improving my chances in split format events.
I guess the conclusion is that I wasn’t adequately prepared for this PT, and I learned a few things to help avoid that situation in the future, but Wizards does not try to make it easy. PTs often showcase new formats, so they often require a lot of useful effort. That is to say that just putting time in isn’t enough, it’s on the players to put in the right kind of time, and to figure out on their own what that is. I hate buying cards, but I think one conclusion is that I should really invest in putting good decks together, as it’s much easier to test with real cards, and I’m also far more likely to play a different deck than I was expecting if I already have the cards together. Physically possessing everything would make it easier to avoid a bias based on ease of use in selecting a deck for an event. This is the first time you’ll see me advising you purely as a player to invest in more cards if you want to improve your game, particularly your tournament preparation.
I’m frustrated that I won’t be playing in Sao Paulo, as my performance this trip has been disappointing and I would love to have an opportunity to make up for it this weekend. I won’t be attending because I hadn’t really realized that Americans ever needed visas to visit other countries, as I’ve gone to a number of them now and never looked into it or heard anything about it. The information that I needed one of certainly available out there, I just never knew to look for it. Before travelling outside of the country, make absolutely sure you have the appropriate paperwork such that nothing will go wrong.
On last thing I’d like to report on briefly is the discussion Wizards had with players about Magic Online on Saturday night. They know that there are a lot of problems with Magic Online, and there are a lot of things players aren’t happy about. They seem aware of most of the bugs. On Saturday night they decided to jump into the shark tank and take questions about the future of Magic Online and people’s current problems with it for about an hour.
My understanding of the summary is something like this: Wizards’s budget is controlled by Hasbro. Magic Online is a digital initiative. Gleemax was the last one of those, and it went very poorly, so Hasbro’s lost a little faith. As a result of some combination of that and the economy, there is a hiring freeze on Magic Online developers, which, from most players’ point of view, there probably aren’t enough of. This means that they can only address issues at a certain rate. Every morning they have a meeting about what problems they need to prioritize and how to address various situations. They have a list of all the problems and everything they want, and they just go through things as they can.
At the moment, stability and leagues are at the top of that list, as old user statistics indicate that leagues were the most popular feature that is not currently operational. This is unlikely to change, but where they go from there can be influenced by player feedback as they try to get a sense for what the next things to work on are.
A number of “fixes” to Magic Online that you might not expect are hindered by various online gaming laws. For example, there is a concern that implementing fractions of event tickets, which would make event tickets more closely resemble currency and which would have no function other than to use them as currency, would run into laws against printing digital money, or something like that. At the moment, they can claim that the tickets aren’t online cash, they’re just items used to enter events. They were very clear about the fact that online gaming laws are so bizarre and so varied in different parts of the world that the whole thing is extremely difficult, and it sounds like the process requires a lot of work from a legal team. This seemed like it may also be a potential concern if they were to try to switch to an “auction house” style system.
Basically they came across to me as if they knew what they were doing and they were generally making good decisions, but they’re substantially constrained by resources and other obstacles that may not be immediately obvious. Also, they made it sound like a number of good announces would be coming out shortly.
And all of that is what I’ll be taking away from this Pro Tour.
Thanks for reading.
Sam