I went to college at Virginia Tech. When I left to go to school, I was bright-eyed, bushy-eight-and-a-half-tailed, and hungry to succeed. I had graduated
top of my class in high school, and I knew I had a bright future. My freshman year I was part of a program called The Well. I’m pretty sure “Well” was an
acronym for something, of which the first word was “Wellness,” but I don’t remember what the rest was. I’m sure those Ls stood for something important.
Learning? Lifestyle? Llurghoyf? Something like that.
The Well consisted of the first two floors of one of the dormitories, and the idea was that the people involved in the program would forego drinking
alcohol and the party lifestyle in order to focus better on academics. I wanted to do well in college, so that seemed like a fair deal to me.
I made a large number of terrible decisions while I was in college. The end result of my collegiate career was that I stuck around for seven years and
never got a degree. That doesn’t happen unless you mess up a lot. And I did. I had no motivation, no will to succeed, and suffered from depression. Nearly
every single thing I did in college was a poor decision. This was not one of those mistakes. In fact, living in The Well was one of the best decisions I’ve
ever made.
Now, we may have decided to give up drinking and other forms of partying as part of our decision to live in The Well, but that didn’t mean our alternative
option of focusing better on academia ever really came to fruition. I became friends with a lot of the people in The Well to the point where most of the
people who lived on our floor were part of our friend group. It was pretty awesome. We had a great time, and my freshman year of college was easily one of
the best years of my life.
For the most part, we were pretty into gaming. And for the most part, that game was Halo. Like eight to twelve percent of other people my age, I had
purchased an XBox when I was in high school solely to play the game Halo. Halo is one of the best console games of all time, if not the best. Halo was the
only game I owned for XBox, and I felt no reason to own anything else. I eventually changed my mind and bought a second game. It was called Halo 2, and it
came out my sophomore year. My roommate and I skipped class that day.
We would spend hours a day playing sixteen-player LAN games across the VT network. Games were wild, awesome, and rowdy. I loved it. Halo wasn’t the only
game we played. We played a lot of Spades, Poker, and other card games. I also started playing this game called World of Warcraft that eventually consumed
my life for a few years. One of our friends also taught a few of us how to play this game called Magic: the Gathering. It was a really interesting game,
and a few of us got hooked.
We would play it occasionally, and on a whim one day we decided to go to a local game store and play at this thing called Friday Night Magic. It turned out
to be the release for a new set called Time Spiral. I opened a card called Sengir Nosferatu in my first pack of the draft, and I never looked
back. I went 2-2 in the draft, and I was just happy I didn’t make a fool of myself. I looked forward to going back some other time and doing it again.
Fast forward nearly ten years later, and I never stopped doing it again.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back before I learned how to play Magic or even attended my first event, there was Halo. On a relatively uneventful day
early in the fall semester a rather quiet guy approached us. He saw us playing Halo and asked us if he could play. We obliged the request, and one of my
friends asked him, “Are you good at Halo?”
His response was simple. “Well, I did get second place in a Halo tournament.” And thus we called him Mr. Second Place. Now, Mr. Second Place was
good at Halo, but he was never able to overcome his nickname earned that fateful autumn day. He quickly became a good friend of ours, but I remember the
name “Mr. Second Place” a lot easier than I remember his real name.
Last weekend, I lost in the finals of Grand Prix Oklahoma City. Shortly afterward, someone referred to me as “Mr. Second Place” and it immediately
triggered my memory of that fall day nearly ten years ago. It reminded me not only of that moment but also of how it began…how I learned to play
Magic…how I got hooked on the game that would define me ten years later.
“Are you good at Magic?”
“Well, I did get second place at a Magic tournament.”
…
GP Oklahoma City was not an event I felt prepared for. That’s not to say that I didn’t prepare for the tournament–far from it, actually–just that I
wasn’t ready. As Illidan used to say, “You are not prepared.” And I wasn’t. As I mentioned in my article last week I spent a few weeks testing exclusively
for Modern. It wasn’t enough. Or at least I didn’t think so. I didn’t end up playing any of the decks I tested.
Up until Thursday, I was planning on taking the plunge with Abzan Little Kid. It gets the “little kid” moniker because it is based around the idea of
playing things like Birds of Paradise and Noble Hierarch to accelerate out some big fat creatures ahead of schedule, basically the style of Magic
associated with newer players. I guess deep down, I’m still a little kid at heart, ’cause I like this style of Magic. In this case, Abzan Little Kid meant
cards like Anafenza, the Foremost and Siege Rhinoceros.
The deck can be fairly aptly described as “Medium.” It’s not a bad deck, but it isn’t exactly hitting a home run either. I was pretty resigned to a fate of
6-3. I was winning matches with the deck, but not enough to where I felt super confident. Losing a round to Blood Moon or G/R Tron or just flooding out on
these mana creatures seemed pretty normal to expect.
A tweet I sent out the Thursday before the GP fairly accurately summed up my expectations.
My expectations are super low for GP OKC, despite testing almost nonstop
Modern the past two weeks. One day I’ll figure this format out!
— Brian Braun-Duin (@BraunDuinIt) September 10, 2015
Thankfully, Sam Pardee responded to the tweet saying that he had a deck I could play. He was willing to ship me a list that he had been crushing Magic
Online with. I told him to send it my way, but that I probably wasn’t going to play it. I was secretly hoping it wasn’t U/R Twin because I hated playing
that deck, but I know it’s the kind of deck he likes to play.
I think you know where this is going.
The list he sent me was freaking U/R Twin. Damnit, Sam, you couldn’t even splash a color? What’s wrong with you?
In a rare and uncharacteristic move, I decided to play the deck. It wasn’t my style of deck; not even close. I wasn’t practiced with the deck. But I knew
deep down that playing this deck was going to yield me a better result than if I had played any of the other decks on my list. So in a way, I was oddly at
peace with my decision. The tournament felt like a free-roll for me. I had no expectations, and I wasn’t going to be hurt if I did poorly at it. Might as
well take a plunge with a deck I’m not experienced with and trust in the results of someone whose Modern track record speaks for itself.
I brought the cards for Abzan and Jund anyway. I have commitment issues, okay?
My friends made fun of me for my indecisiveness and last minute audible. But you know who got the last laugh? It certainly wasn’t these friends of mine.
It wasn’t me either. It was Zac Elsik who beat me in the finals with Lantern Control. You know you’re playing some good old fashioned Magic when you go for
a turn 1 Serum Visions and your opponent snaps off a turn 1 Ghoulcaller’s Bell off of a Llanowar Wastes to mill the Snapcaster Mage you scryed on top. I
would say that it felt like Innistrad Draft all over again, except almost nobody played Ghoulcaller’s Bell in Innistrad Draft, and
likewise, nobody was lucky enough to ever open a Snapcaster Mage.
People made fun of me for losing the finals of a Grand Prix to a bunch of draft commons, but I definitely take some umbrage with that. It’s offensive to
me. Have some respect for the game. These weren’t draft commons. None of these cards were ever good enough to see play in draft. They were far worse than
draft commons. If you’re going to go out of your way to try to dagger me, at least take the time to come up with a technically correct argument.
Anyway, I want to take some time and talk about the tournament and the deck and how it all happened. U/R Twin is an interesting deck where there are so
many ways to build it and play it, and I feel like I should share my opinion on that. I’m not going to say that my opinion is correct by any stretch. I’ve
only played a few tournaments with the deck, but I actually feel like I got a really good understanding of Twin from those two tournaments. I’m
inexperienced with Twin but experienced with Magic. Not sure where that gets us, but you’ll have to take the plunge and read on to find out.
To start with, here is the list I played.
Creatures (11)
Lands (23)
Spells (26)
My list was identical to Sam Pardee’s except I cut the second Desolate Lighthouse for a fifth Island on behest of Mike Sigrist who claimed that having
three colorless lands was costing him too many games. I’d rather cast my spells on time than have a little bit of lategame advantage in a second Lighthouse
so I made the swap. They ended up posting my list wrong when they posted decklists. They listed me as playing two copies of Lighthouse and only four
Islands. My guess is that they just copied Sam Pardee’s list, not realizing that I actually only played 74/75, rather than just using the list I emailed in
(which I went back and verified was correct).
This is kind of awkward in hindsight, as Zac cast a Pithing Needle and named Desolate Lighthouse in game 1, thinking I played two copies of the card. I
only played one, and I later drew the Lighthouse, and having it locked out by Pithing Needle actually had a huge impact on that game. Now, once he landed
an Ensnaring Bridge, I was pretty unlikely to win regardless, but it’s still awkward and that game could have possibly played out completely differently if
he thought I only played one Lighthouse. Maybe he names Deceiver Exarch instead and being able to loot through my deck allows me to find an answer to
Bridge. Or maybe I could find enough burn to finish him off. Either way, there’s nothing that can be done about it now, but it’s still an awkward situation
in hindsight.
I wanted to play the second Desolate Lighthouse over the first Cavern of Souls, but I didn’t want to tinker too much with Sam’s list since there’s a good
chance any changes I would make would just make the list worse. In this case, I think it would have been right to play the second Lighthouse. I looted a
lot over the tournament, and Cavern’s ability helped me cast Vendilion Clique once or twice but otherwise didn’t do anything. Making things uncounterable
had basically no effect on my tournament.
One of the questions I keep getting is about playing U/R Twin over something like Temur Twin or Grixis Twin. Why not splash? It’s hard to articulate
exactly why I think the splash is poor, but the truth is that I do. You gain some value in having a third color, but that same edge is lost in a lot of
different ways.
You take a lot of extra damage from your lands. I played Burn twice in the tournament and won a few games at one life. I don’t think Grixis Twin would have
gotten there for me. Modern is a format where a lot of decks are really close in power level, and slight edges like this can make or break a tournament.
You also become vulnerable to Blood Moon rather than able to take advantage of the card itself. I don’t find it surprising that the finals of the GP was a
Blood Moon deck against an Ensnaring Bridge deck. These are not cards that fit the modern card design, and they are simply far more powerful hate cards
than what should be legal in the format. These cards give you an enormous amount of free wins, and Modern is a volatile enough format where you’ll take any
free wins you can get.
Lastly, U/R Twin takes advantage of the Twin combo better than these other decks. Modern has so many random decks that punish anyone trying to play a fair
game of Magic. A lot of these decks, like G/W Hexproof for example, you are simply never going to beat outside of assembling Deceiver Exarch or Pestermite
+ Splinter Twin. Generally speaking, these super linear, fair-punishing decks are also pretty poor at disrupting the Twin combo themselves. Temur Twin or
Grixis Twin are going to be a lot worse against these decks because they simply have a harder time assembling the combo.
When you break it all down, pure U/R Twin might have a lower overall power level than Grixis Twin or Temur Twin, but it makes up for it in so many other
ways. U/R Twin has more dedication to the combo, a smoother manabase, is more consistent, and has the ability to play more devastating hate cards.
I understand the allure to wanting to play Grixis or Temur Twin, and there are going to be metagames where it is correct to play these versions of the
deck–metagames with a higher density of fair decks–but right now I just think U/R Twin is superior. You might argue, “But it’s so hard to assemble the
Twin combo these days. Everyone has removal. I’d feel safer having an alternate gameplan.” I understand that argument. I really do. I’ve made it myself a
number of times, which is why I’ve previously played things like Grixis Twin.
The thing is that Twin isn’t actually a combo deck. It’s a combo-control deck. The fear of assembling the combo is largely how you control your opponents.
Pound for pound, their cards might be a lot stronger than yours, but when they have to hold two mana open every single turn to represent Abrupt Decay to
prevent you from just killing them with the combo, well, your cards start to look a lot stronger.
I don’t really like the idea of trimming on combo pieces or playing a diluted strategy like Temur Twin or Grixis Twin because your opponent is going to
play less scared of the combo, which is actually a downside. A lot of the value of playing Splinter Twin is that your opponent plays super conservatively
to avoid losing to the combo, which allows you to generate so much of an advantage that you can later combo them anyway through whatever defenses they
have.
Removal spells can be beat with cards like Dispel. Even Abrupt Decay is something you can play around. You can just Remand your Splinter Twin back to your
hand in response to a Decay, allowing you to later put it on a different creature. Or if they wait and let the Twin resolve and then try to Decay your
creature in response to the activation, you can just flash in another Deceiver Exarch or Pestermite to untap the creature and combo kill them in response.
Alternatively, you can just kill them with anemic beats from 1/4 and 2/1 creatures backed up by some burn in the form of Lightning Bolt and Electrolyze.
Winning the game usually isn’t too hard, the hard part is getting to a gamestate where you’re ahead enough to win. The beauty of Twin is that your
opponent’s fear of losing on turn 4 keeps them from playing the kind of game that beats you. And if they play with no fear? Well sometimes you do actually
have the turn 4 kill and they lose anyway.
The tournament went fairly smoothly for me. I won the first few rounds in fairly standard Twin fashion before losing to Jund in round 5. I felt like I was
ahead both games against Jund, but Tarmogoyf kills very fast, and Jund is a deck that doesn’t allow you to rest on your laurels. Jund is definitely one of
the worst matchups for the deck. I’m not sure which is worse between Jund and Abzan, but they are definitely two decks you want to avoid.
I didn’t lose again until round 9, when I ran afoul of Gerry Thompson playing his Grixis Control brew that he and Michael Majors worked on till 3 AM while
I slept in the hotel room like a reasonable person.
Gerry was able to grind me out game 1 with card advantage. Game 2 I managed to win off the sturdy back of Keranos, a card he can’t deal with while it’s on
the battlefield and that he has almost no counterspells for. In game 2 it seemed that Gerry had basically cut all of his removal spells, expecting me to
side out the Twin combo to try to play a fair game versus him. Over the course of game 2, I didn’t see a single piece of interaction that could stop a
Deceiver Exarch and Splinter Twin.
I sideboarded back heavily into the combo, hoping to just catch him off guard and steal an easy win. Unfortunately, Gerry had plans of his own and Molten
Rained me right out of the game. I kept a hand with only a singular blue source. I used Serum Visions on turn 1 and scryed a second blue source and another
Serum Visions to the top in order to make sure I hit my land drops. Gerry Thought Scoured me and then made it rain on my blue source. The Stomping Ground I
drew the next turn was definitely a slap in the face, I’m not gonna lie.
After day 1, I was 7-2. I needed to 6-0 in order to make top 8. It didn’t seem likely, but going 7-2 was already better than I had expected to do in the
event, so there wasn’t really any pressure on me. I was just going to show up day 2, play my games, and see what happened.
Long story short, I did go 6-0. I beat Abzan twice, Storm, Infect, Four-Color Zoo, and Elves en route to the top 8. I was really happy with how I played
those matches. A lot of the games were really close, but I kept winning the close ones through a combination of preparation and luck.
One of the biggest areas that I think people can improve is in how they actually play the games of Magic. In playing Magic it’s important to have a plan
for how you’re going to win at every point of the game. Splinter Twin is the perfect deck to really emphasize this concept. Your gameplan is going to
fluidly change throughout the game, and it’s important to constantly be able to reassess the boardstate and alter how you’re going to play the game based
on it.
Not enough people have a plan when they play Magic. They just kind of play their cards in situations that seem good, but they aren’t really working toward
anything. Pretty much every turn of the game I am thinking “What is my path to win this game?” and alternatively “What is my opponent’s path to win this
game and how do I thwart it?” You have to have something that you’re working toward, and likewise, it is important to be able to change this gameplan when
the situation changes.
Splinter Twin truly embodies this ideal more than most decks do. Splinter Twin is a deck that can win with the infinite combo, but it can also win a normal
game as well. Even more than that, you can win games where you just turbo combo your opponent on turn 4 or games where you slowly grind out their resources
before killing them on turn 10. Splinter Twin is the aggressor in some matchups and the control deck in others.
When you’re playing a deck like Twin that can play so many different roles, it’s important to be able to assess and constantly reassess your role in any
given matchup. Even more than your role in a matchup, you should be able to assess your role in a specific game. There were a lot of games in this
tournament where I was playing to win a fair game, realized that I was too far behind to ever win that way, switched gears and played every turn with the
idea of finding the combo kill. In some regards, I was very lucky that I ended up finding the combo and protection and winning a number of those very close
games, but on the other hand, if I didn’t understand that I needed to switch roles and change how I played accordingly, I likely wouldn’t have even been in
a position to draw those cards I needed to win.
I also realized that I really enjoyed playing Twin. Twin felt like a “puzzle deck” much like Miracles. Figuring out how to win the game through the
information you have available to you is like a puzzle, and I loved trying to piece together exactly how to sequence things to get the end result I wanted.
I had fun playing this tournament.
I then realized that the reason I had hated playing Twin before was because of how miserable the Twin mirror is. When I played U/R Twin at SCG Baltimore,
nearly 50% of my matches were the U/R Twin mirror. It was awful. Now, the Twin mirror is actually really skill intensive and hard to play properly, but
it’s also extremely grindy. I like grindy games of Magic, but not this kind of grindy. I don’t like a game where my path to victory is to pay four mana to
loot with a land seven turns in a row until my hand is slightly stronger than my opponent’s hand. I prefer the kind of grind where creature combat is a
real thing. I’d rather mash Thragtusks together until someone breaks, rather than mash Spell Snares into Snapcaster Mages.
I didn’t play a single Twin mirror in Oklahoma City and for that I am extremely grateful.
Anyway, after going 6-0 in day 2, I ended up making the top 8. There were three decks I didn’t want to face in the top 8: Scapeshfit, Merfolk, and Lantern
Control. I didn’t think that these were necessarily bad matchups, I simply didn’t know whether they were or not.
I ended up playing against two of the three. In the first round I beat Scapeshift. He took game 1 when I couldn’t find a Twin to pair with my Deceiver
Exarch when he had nothing, but I knew from seeing his list that he was pretty much just cold to a Blood Moon, and I played games 2 and 3 with the sole
purpose of finding, deploying, and protecting Blood Moon. It worked out perfectly.
In the semifinals I played against Affinity. Game 1 was a really interesting game. I ended up missing a kill, but won the game anyway. I took a lot of heat
for missing the kill. It was a pretty obscure line but the commentators kept discussing it, which meant that everyone who was tuning in to coverage knew
about it. I’m pretty sure that if the coverage team didn’t see the line, then most of the people watching at home wouldn’t have noticed it either, but at
any rate, it was kind of surreal feeling to check social media after I won this match and have my Twitter feed and Facebook inbox full of people telling me
how I had messed up. Whoops.
The situation was that I had a Snapcaster Mage with a Splinter Twin on it, a Deceiver Exarch in play, and a Cryptic Command in my graveyard. I could give
the Cryptic Command Flashback, bounce the Splinter Twin and replay it on the Deceiver Exarch. I simply missed the line. It wasn’t something that had ever
come up for me before. In fact, that was the first time I had ever put a Splinter Twin on a Snapcaster Mage in the first place, so everything that happened
that game was already uncharted territory.
I ended up winning the game anyway in pretty sweet fashion. I drew a Splinter Twin the last turn of the game, which allowed me to cast three Lightning
Bolts at my opponent, make a token Snapcaster Mage with the Twin’d Snapcaster on the battlefield and give a Lightning Bolt Flashback. I was able to
Flashback that Lightning Bolt and then cast Splinter Twin on the token of Snapcaster Mage to make another token Snapcaster Mage and give another Lightning
Bolt Flashback. Three you. My opponent was at fifteen, and I got to hit him for exactly fifteen with five Lightning Bolts. There’s nothing quite like the
thrill of going upstairs with five Lightning Bolts in the same turn.
Game 2 was the Decevier Exarch into Splinter Twin show, and it was more of a digital short than a feature length film.
It’s funny to me that I felt like I played a really great tournament yet people remember that one mistake a lot more than anything else. That certainly
wasn’t the only mistake I made in this event or even on camera. It was just a lot more pronounced and memorable. A lot of people are rooting for players
like me or people in a similar position to make exactly those kinds of mistakes. It provides validation. “He is in the top 4 of a Grand Prix and he made a
mistake that I wouldn’t have made, therefore, I too am good enough to make top 4 of a Grand Prix.”
In some regards, this line of thinking is okay. It’s good to have confidence in your play ability to succeed playing Magic, because without that level of
confidence, it’s not possible to get there. On the same hand, this can be a really damaging mentality. It can easily lead to entitlement (I deserve to be
there), which creates bitterness. If you feel you deserve something, you’re less likely to work for it and earn it and less likely to realize the mistakes
you’re making that are preventing you from achieving it. It can suck the fun out of the game. It can also create hatred and envy when you see people who
are “inferior” players performing well in tournaments and earning the success that you feel you deserve instead.
There is only one thing in Magic we can control: ourselves. We should ignore the externals and just focus on being the best player we can be. Don’t worry
about other people’s success and failures or compare yourself to them. Just focus on your own path to self-improvement and what you can do to get better.
Comparing yourself to others is really flawed anyway. We as humans are notoriously bad at self-reflection. We always see or value ourselves far differently
than others do. Comparisons break down when we don’t have a good understanding of the two things we’re comparing, and we certainly don’t understand
ourselves, let alone others.
At any rate, I didn’t play a perfect tournament by any stretch, but I did feel like I played some of the best Magic I’ve played in a long time. 2015 was a
poor year for me, but the last month I could tell something had changed. I’ve been playing better and getting better results. It started with GP London,
continued to the Season Three Invitational with a top 16 and a top 4 in the Legacy Premier IQ the next day, and culminated in this GP second place.
I’m not sure what has changed, but I’ve just really been enjoying playing Magic lately and also doing a lot better with it. I feel more relaxed and I feel
like I’m making better plays, but it’s hard for me to really quantify why that is. The human brain is a tough nut to crack.
I lost in the finals to Lantern Control. This was a deck that Zac Elsik premiered at GP Charlotte a few months ago. I actually watched a few of his matches
at that tournament. I was watching a friend play a win-and-in for day 2 and Zac was playing the match next to him. I ended up just birding that match the
entire time because the deck looked so interesting.
I also watched the last match of day 2 where Zac was able to systematically tear apart an Abzan Collected Company deck en route to a top 16 performance.
I knew the deck was not a fluke. Having seen it in action, I knew it was a real deck and so it was no surprise to me that he ran it back to a GP win in
Oklahoma City. Also, and this may come as a surprise, I actually enjoyed playing against the deck in the finals.
Lantern Control, much like Legacy Miracles, is a puzzle deck. The pieces are all there, you just have to figure out how they all fit to win the game. Zac
was a master at putting the puzzle together, and I had a lot of fun trying to break that puzzle up. I didn’t succeed, but it felt like an old-school battle
of wits. Two people trying to maneuver a game to a conclusion they want with all the information face up on the table.
I got second place this time. I fell short in the battle of wits, but next time I’ll be more prepared. They say, “never bring a knife to a gunfight”, but
nobody ever said anything about bringing a Vandalblast to a Bridge fight, which is what I intend to do. Who knows, maybe I’ll mix it up and bring a
Shatterstorm instead. Either way, you’d better be ready to pick that board up.