Honolulu marked my first Pro Tour in four years. It was kind of hard to process that. Magic had been such a central part of my life for so long. I played in the very first Pro Tour as a junior back in 1996. I won a Grand Prix in 1997. I made Top 4 at a Pro Tour in 2001, and won another Grand Prix in 2003. It’s 2009. Where had the time gone?
I never intended to quit Magic. It sort of just happened. I skipped one Pro Tour due to other commitments, and then missed another because I got sick just after moving across the country to California. Suddenly I needed to make Top 32 to stay on the train, and as fate would have it, that event happened to be the “skins” Pro Tour. I made Day 2, but picked up my third loss in the very first round of the second day and I was out with no chance to keep fighting to stay qualified.
With my new job doing game design and a new game — World of Warcraft — to fuel my compulsive gaming needs, I just didn’t have the same drive to play Magic. After one unsuccessful trip to a local PTQ, I just stopped bothering entirely.
I still followed Magic. I read the Monday and Friday columns on MagictheGathering.com every week, and looked at new sets and new cards whenever spoilers would be released. Living and working with gamers makes it hard to stay away entirely. My apartment with Ben Seck played host to big screen Magic Online drafts, and I occasionally made my own forays into MTGO, but after timing out with a Golgari Rotwurm in play and a Black mana in my pool against an opponent at one life, I fell away from playing even in the digital world.
It wasn’t until the announcement of the creation of the Magic Hall of Fame that I felt some serious regret about quitting. Despite the assurances of some friends who felt I had a good shot of making it, I was afraid my stats just didn’t stand up against many of the other Hall of Fame eligible players. I only had a single Pro Tour Top 8, and my eight GP Top 8s had ceased to be as world travelers like Olivier Ruel racked up many times that. I had a high profile in the community because of things like writing, deckbuilding, and doing the color commentary for Pro Tour broadcasts, but I felt like I was at least one big finish away from having a legitimate shot.
It wasn’t until Pro Tour: LA last year that I really started to get the fire back. I drove up with Patrick Sullivan and Ben Seck only intending to hang out, and on the drive up they convinced me to play in the LCQ. I didn’t know anything about the format or any of the legal cards, so I scrounged up a copy of the deck Pat was playing — a Red deck with Magus of the Moon and Magus of the Scroll, which were comfortingly familiar. I went 4-2 in the LCQ, reading cards as I went, including having to ask to look at my opponent’s Mutavaults because mine were Japanese and I couldn’t remember exactly what they did. I watched the block PTQ the next day and got the fever to brew up a deck, so I spent the day playing a proxied-up five-color Doran/Reveillark deck. I borrowed all of the cards and played in the PTQ the next day, once again finishing 4-2. I kept thinking about all the ways I could tweak and improve the deck for the next tournament. I was hooked once again.
After a number of unsuccessful attempts to qualify for Berlin, I won a PTQ for Honolulu. My testing began in earnest the moment the Alara Reborn spoiler was released. Thankfully, despite my prolonged absence from the Pro Tour, I was if anything in a better position to prepare than in the past. While during my previous time on the Pro Tour I lived in Atlanta and tested almost exclusively over Apprentice, now I live only twenty minutes away from Ben Rubin. Ben was my partner in deckbuilding for years. He has one of the sharpest analytical minds I’ve ever encountered and doesn’t shy away from unconventional solutions to problems. Our problem now was finding the best deck.
So that’s what we set out to do, just like old times. Except the Magic world really has changed since I last played on the Pro Tour. Preparing for new block formats used to be a very different process, since there was no information available about the format other than the occasional predictions on strategy websites. There simply weren’t events to draw on for data. Nowadays, things are very different. Magic Online defines new formats before major events. Before, people had at best a very general sense of what to expect in a block metagame. Now there are hundreds of decklists available well before the actual Pro Tour.
The only decklists we had early on were from pre-Alara Reborn, which wasn’t a huge help because of how powerful the new cards promised to be, but it was somewhere to start at least. The old block lists highlighted the power of planeswalkers, with nearly every Shards/Conflux event completely dominated by Naya decks featuring Elspeth and Ajani. Before Maelstrom Pulse, planeswalkers were only really vulnerable to Oblivion Ring and creature combat, so it’s not really surprising that the best planeswalker decks were the ones that also had the acceleration of Noble Hierarch and the quick offense of Wild Nacatl. Getting ahead on the board and sticking a planeswalker meant your opponent had an extremely hard time catching up.
Alara Reborn, however, changed everything. Naya no longer had the most dominant early game — Putrid Leech saw to that — nor did it have a monopoly over efficient planeswalker removal anymore, thanks to Maelstrom Pulse. And Bloodbraid Elf changed everything. Not only was the elf extremely powerful in the card advantage and selection it provided, the fact that it has haste drastically weakened the board control of Ajani Vengeant. Because Bloodbraid Elf promised to be everywhere, sticking an Ajani didn’t mean nearly as much, since your opponent could take it out with a hasty attack that brought extra value with it from cascade.
Our earliest brews all started without Bloodbraid Elf, whether for color reasons or the desire to play X-spells like Martial Coup or Lavalanche, and then slowly but surely the defining card of the format crept into all of our decks. My first deck was a Fertile Ground–Armillary Sphere-fueled creation that tried to use the big X-spells, but even with the acceleration it couldn’t handle fast planeswalkers without a Maelstrom Pulse. At that point, Ben Rubin was playing mostly with a Bant deck that used only Elspeth as non-creature cards, and we pretty much simultaneously both changed our decks to fit Bloodbraid Elf. Here’s a rough sketch of what the two decks looked like at that point:
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Bituminous Blast
4 Terminate
4 Maelstrom Pulse
4 Armillary Sphere
3 Resounding Thunder
4 Broodmate Dragon
3 Violent Ultimatum
3 Jund Charm
1 Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund
26 Lands
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Steward of Valeron
4 Knotvine Paladin
4 Dauntless Escort
4 Woolly Thoctar
4 Bloodbraid Elf
3 Rafiq of the Many
3 Thornling
4 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
2 Path to Exile
1 Finest Hour
23 Lands, including 4 Ancient Ziggurat
It was around this time that we came upon the results of a live block tournament in Malaysia. The standout deck of that tournament was a Jund beatdown deck with Bloodhall Oozes that made up fully half of the Top 8. Neither Ben or I really liked the deck, which felt like it had very clunky mana and awkwardly wanted Borderposts for Ooze and Hackblade but hated hitting them with Bloodbraid Elf. Despite that, it was clear that the deck would define the testing environment for players preparing for the Pro Tour, so it was crucial to pay it some respect.
The card that the Jund beatdown deck really highlighted for me was Blightning. When I played my Jund control deck against the Ooze version over and over, I kept losing games to Blightning, because it would prevent me from casting my big spells to turn the game around either by stripping those cards from me or by stripping much needed land. Armillary Sphere helped against Blightning, but was simply too bad to hit off a cascade against the fast decks where you really needed Bloodbraid Elf to be Flametongue Kavu. As a result, we cut a lot of the bigger spells in the Jund deck and lowered the curve to include creatures that could both get in the way against beatdown and give cascade a solid hit on an empty board. We really wanted to fit more land in the deck, but Armillary Sphere was too bad and just playing more basics seemed asking to be flooded. Ben came up with the idea of using landcyclers that wouldn’t mess up your cascades and would give you something meaningful to cast if you drew them when you already had enough lands. With a few more tweaks, the deck looked like this:
4 Putrid Leech
4 Sprouting Thrinax
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Broodmate Dragon
4 Bituminous Blast
4 Terminate
4 Maelstrom Pulse
2 Sarkhan Vol
2 Caldera Hellion
2 Igneous Pouncer
26 Lands
Sarkhan Vol and Caldera Hellion were more of Ben’s additions to give the deck some extra tools. I was hesitant about Sarkhan Vol at first, but warmed to the planeswalker as a must-remove threat against control decks and a way to handle the otherwise nightmarish Thornling pretty quickly. Hellion was a neat combo with the Threaten half of Sarkhan Vol and also put the deck over the top against the Naya/Bant decks that filled the board with 2-3 toughness creatures. Pouncer played reasonably well, but many times actually having to pay to cycle him early on was too rough on your mana, and ultimately we decided the deck was probably just better off just playing more lands. We were on the fence about Blightning in the main deck — it was clear it was a power card, but without it in the deck, every cascade was guaranteed to be a removal spell or potential blocker against beatdown decks. The more the field looked to be controlling, however, the higher Blightning’s stock rose.
The Bant deck mostly stopped evolving at this point, since it wasn’t that great against either the Jund Beatdown deck or the Jund control deck. The deck really needed Path and/or Oblivion Ring to handle fast Bloodhall Oozes, and putting too many reactive cards in the deck really diluted its effectiveness against control. At this point Ben mostly focused his attention on getting various control decks with Wall of Denial to work, while I kept tuning Jund.
It was around that point that we got a four-color Naya/Jund Cascade list from Neil Reeves. The deck eschewed Putrid Leeches in favor of Captured Sunlight under the idea that if everyone is cascading, you want to try to make their cascades as weak as possible, so you’re better off playing a deck that doesn’t have early permanents that they can profitably cascade into removal on. For the same reason the deck played Enlisted Wurm over Broodmate Dragon — the deck had only Sprouting Thrinax and Bloodbraid Elf as Bituminous Blast targets, reducing the value other Jund decks would get from them. It also played Uril, who promised to be very difficult for opposing Jund decks to remove.
That list looked like this:
4 Sprouting Thrinax
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Enlisted Wurm
3 Uril, the Miststalker
4 Captured Sunlight
3 Maelstrom Pulse
3 Celestial Purge
4 Bituminous Blast
4 Blightning
27 Land
Ben was immediately on board with this version, and I tried it out a bit in Magic Online queues. I won most of the matches I played and felt really good about the list. Cascade is a strange mechanic in that playing more of it up the curve makes the potential upside of every cascade card that much higher. Playing Enlisted Wurm into Bituminous Blast into Bloodbraid Elf into Blightning feels completely unfair, and the ability to chain cascades made this version all that much more attractive. I wasn’t convinced by maindeck Celestial Purge, since I felt there would be a lot of decks where it would be dead or at least a lot of situations in which cascading into it would be useless, but otherwise I was pretty excited about the deck in theory, though I definitely felt I needed more games against real opponents rather than random people on Magic Online.
Then the MTGO championships happened, and the metagame began to crystallize. The Top 8 was full of Jund midrange/control decks, many of them with mirror hate cards like Algae Gharial and Uril. Talking to other players at GP: Seattle, it became very clear that everyone was either playing Jund or playing to beat it. While it was clearly the most powerful deck, I was growing less inclined to play it. I hate playing a deck with a target on its head. Magic Online queues had already started filling up with anti-Jund decks, and while many of them didn’t actually beat Jund despite their deckbuilders’ intentions, I was sure that the Pro Tour would have better tuned hate decks. Uril and Exotic Orchard doubled in price at the Grand Prix alone.
Two days later, I flew to Hawaii and made my way to the baller beach house I was sharing with Ben Rubin, Jelger Wiegersma, Jamie Parke, Paul Rietzl, David Williams, Gabriel Nassif, and Noah Boeken, among others. The general attitude there was that no one wanted to play Jund, but no one really had a deck they were happy with — except Jelger. Jelger had an Esper beatdown deck he’d gotten from Neil Reeves a few days beforehand, and he was playing it against all comers. The deck was fast, and had enough fliers and pro-color creatures that it could largely ignore the ground defenses of Jund. I was intrigued by the deck, but leery of playing something that simply couldn’t remove a permanent from play. G/W decks were on the rise online, and both Battlegrace Angel and Behemoth Sledge were huge problems for the Esper deck.
I kept testing various Jund lists, ultimately giving up on the four-color Cascade version because of awkward mana and the inability to punish slow starts like lists with Putrid Leech could do. I tried all kinds of things, including playing singleton copies of Behemoth Sledge and Karrthas for the mirror match, but I just couldn’t come up with anything that really made me feel like I had a legitimate edge. The theoretical advantages from unusual card choices just seemed to fall down in comparison to the mana consistency and curve of the more straightforward Jund decks.
I went to the tournament site to register and in the car ride there decided I’d pick up a copy of the Esper beatdown deck so I’d at least have the option of playing that or Jund. While I was there, I learned that Uril was selling for $30, and was by far the most requested card. A number of pros were planning on playing Five-Color Control. I may have been worried about playing a deck I had much less experience with that seemed so fragile, but the idea of playing mirror matches and against decks tailored specifically to beat mine seemed even less appealing. By the time I got back to the beach house I’d decided on Esper. Ben Rubin warned me that the deck was complicated to play with little practice, so I got a few games in that night, went over sideboarding plans, and got to sleep feeling like I was making the right choice.
The next morning I woke up early, put on a suit, and was ready to make my return to the Pro Tour in style…