Pro Tour Fate Reforged And The Expected Value Of Friendship

As I’ve mentioned
, my preparation for Pro Tour Fate Reforged was very different from my preparation for any other Pro Tour in the last four years or so. I stayed at home
and worked with my housemate Justin Cohen and coordinated with the rest of Team Work on Facebook, Google Hangouts, and a few in person. The only games I
actually saw were games I played, and that was a big difference from testing in a house where I could watch several matches at a time.

Exploring the format by ourselves took longer than doing it with a team, and that meant we didn’t have time to do a lot of drafting. Justin and I didn’t
draft at all after the release weekend for Fate Reforged, though we’d done fifteen or so drafts by then. Devoting extra time to Constructed felt like a
necessary evil, but I think personally playing with almost every deck helped us know the format better than we might have if we’d relied on others to tell
us which decks we should take seriously and how various matchups go. There’s really no substitute for just putting hours in yourself and playing games.

Our process was fairly simple. We’d choose a matchup and play a match, then trade decks to play the other side of the match, then maybe trade back, playing
two, four, or six matches of a matchup, and then move on to something else. If a matchup was at all close, this wouldn’t tell us a whole lot about who was
favored, but it would be enough that we could have a sense of how it felt from each side, and we could each try sideboarding the way we thought we should
and discuss why we did what we did.

Early on, I decided I wanted to try tuning Abzan Aristocrats. With Birthing Pod in the format, it felt like a bad version of that deck, but with that
banned, I knew creatures that were hard to really kill would be great against other Abzan decks, and I thought the synergies were powerful enough that
there might really be something there. Justin and I put a lot of time into working on that deck–I have the results of 80 games recorded in our spreadsheet
and a handful of matches at the end didn’t make it.

The deck evolved a lot. I started with Noble Hierarch and Birds of Paradise because I knew that my cards were weak individually, and I needed to get
several of them in play, and I thought the only way to deploy those synergies in time was to accelerate them. I started here:

Abzan Aristocrats

Sam Black

Test deck on 02-11-2015

Modern

Creatures (31)

Lands (21)

Spells (8)

Sideboard

I liked what this deck was doing, but I just couldn’t get it to the point where it was good enough against combo decks, and it was also behind against
Burn. I knew the sideboard could help, but I couldn’t fix everything. I was tempted to give up, but then I wondered about giving myself a combo finish so
that I could race and Chord of Calling to find bullets for problematic matches, and I came to this:

Abzan Chord

Sam Black

Test deck on 02-11-2015

Modern

Creatures (32)

Lands (22)

Spells (6)

Sideboard

This was pretty good at assembling the Melira combo, but I missed Return to the Ranks, which could win games where you’d fallen behind. I tried several
versions that mixed the two and eventually I realized that, while my creatures were good against decks with Abrupt Decay, I was losing to decks with
Lightning Bolt. My entire goal was to make a deck that was good against removal, but I had too many good targets for Lightning Bolt that I was leaning on
too heavily. I decided it was hopeless and set the project aside.

Justin had been playing Amulet Bloom before the bannings. He knew Amulet Bloom had a good matchup against Birthing Pod decks and hoped Birthing Pod
wouldn’t be banned so that he could play Amulet Bloom again at the Pro Tour. When Birthing Pod was banned, he didn’t know exactly how the metagame would
change but feared that it would get worse.

We predicted a rise of Abzan early, and Matthias Hunt, whose articles introduced Justin to the archetype, had always said the deck was bad against
Thoughtseize. Justin assumed the deck would be poorly positioned and decided early on that he’d probably just play whatever I played. When Aristocrats
looked promising, Justin was happy to test against it because it seemed likely that we’d both play it. As holes started emerging, Justin asked what the
point was–what was this deck doing well that I was so drawn to. I didn’t know. I felt like there would probably be more fair decks than unfair decks, and
I thought I could get this deck to have a good matchup against fair decks. Beyond that, I just didn’t know enough about how good the deck could be and
wanted to explore it.

As time passed, Justin felt more and more pressure to commit to a deck and learn it (which will always make it hard to play a deck of mine, as I always
seem to be changing things up to the very end). When I wanted to take a break from my deck, I helped Justin work on Amulet Bloom.

Justin talked to Matthias and Stephen Speck about how they approached the matchup and figured out a sideboard plan to try. We played a few matches, and I
actually felt hopeless on the Abzan side. People have this perception that Amulet Bloom is a glass canon turn 2 combo deck, but that’s far from the
reality. I think of the deck more like a Tron deck with a turn 2 kill. Abzan needs a perfect draw to beat you. If they don’t have discard, you can always
race them, and if they don’t have pressure, you can always rebuild. The key is that you don’t have to rebuild a combo; as turns pass, you almost never miss
a land drop because you have around 26-27 lands in your deck depending on how you sideboard, and ten of them are bounce lands. Even against Liliana of the
Veil, it’s easy to play a land every turn. Once you have enough lands in play, you don’t need to find Amulet of Vigor and Summer Bloom: you can just cast
powerful green creatures that trump their creatures. It feels like playing every other Primeval Titan ramp deck in history against a midrange creature
deck–Primeval Titan beats midrange creature decks.

Justin wasn’t convinced, even after winning seven out of ten post sideboard games against Abzan. He thought he’d just gotten lucky, and the matchup was
still probably bad. I was playing the Abzan side (we happened to play this session differently), and it felt like Amulet Bloom was the clear favorite to
me.

I had one last idea with my Aristocrats deck though. I was losing to Lightning Bolt. I’d left a hole in my protection from removal that that card could
exploit, but I could close that hole by moving away from creatures that Lightning Bolt matched up well against. I realized that what I’d been trying to
accomplish with Birds of Paradise was to have a board full of creatures by turn 3 or 4, so that I could play Abzan Ascendancy and I’d be far ahead, but
Birds of Paradise gave my opponent a chance to keep pace with my creatures with removal to stop that. Instead, I could start with Doomed Traveler, Young
Wolf, or Tukatongue Thallid, then I could play Cartel Aristocrat, Voice of Resurgence, or Sultai Emissary, and I’d be sure both of those creatures would
still be in play on turn 3, and I could start playing things that needed me to have a board. Also, having more value creatures meant that all my
sacrificing and Returned to the Ranks were more powerful. My deck had far more synergies and felt much better than previous versions.

Abzan Aristocrats

Sam Black

Test deck on 02-11-2015

Modern

Creatures (31)

Lands (21)

Spells (8)

Sideboard

I was back to where I wanted to be–I felt ahead against all the fair decks, not just the B/G/x decks.

The day before the Pro Tour, I didn’t know which deck I was going to play. Amulet Bloom seemed great to me, and I knew Justin would do well, but I was
afraid that there might be a lot of Blood Moons in the tournament, and I thought I’d have more fun playing the deck I built. I played Aristocrats against
David Heineman, who’d planned to play Jeskai, and he felt hopeless game after game until he asked why he wasn’t playing that deck. I explained that it was
bad against combo decks, and we’d need to figure out a sideboard to help some of that, but that it was definitely great against some decks. He decided he
wanted to play a deck that would give him some great matchups and that would take away his opponent’s advantage of knowing the format better than him (he
hadn’t tested much) by throwing something unexpected at them. I decided Amulet Bloom was too good not to play. I felt like it was great against basically
everything but Splinter Twin and Storm (it’s also bad against Infect, but I foolishly wasn’t expecting to see much of that), and it can always steal
matches against anyone if it gets its nut draws.

There was some concern that it’d been picking up on MTGO, but in my experience, very few pros actually take Amulet Bloom seriously because it looks
gimmicky and fragile and inconsistent (it’s none of those things), and I just expected everyone to write off the recent spikes on MTGO. Besides, if you’re
not familiar, the deck can really take quite a while to learn, and most teams wouldn’t have an expert with the deck ready to teach people. It was hard for
me to imagine it being played as heavily as it was on Magic Online, and even if it did turn out to be heavily played, I didn’t think people who weren’t
playing it would appreciate it as a serious threat to specifically focus on beating.

My tournament started off badly. I thought I drafted well and ended up with a really good deck, but after four land-heavy draws, I’d started a quick 0-2,
0-4 in games. The last round of the draft, my deck drew well, and I won pretty handily. It was a rough start, but I still felt pretty happy because my
friends from Madison were doing well. I won my first round of Constructed, but lost the next, and at 2-3, things were looking pretty grim. I basically
resigned myself to rooting on my friends, David playing my deck, which I really hoped wouldn’t disappoint him, and Matt Severa, who just needed a solid
finish to reach Silver, and Justin–I can’t really encompass the importance of Justin doing well into a piece of a sentence here.

As the day went on, Justin and I kept winning, and I was feeling better and better about the deck. We both won our last three rounds, and Matt and Justin
were 6-2, and David and I were 5-3. Our team overall had done solidly, most of us had winning records, though we had no 8-0 or 7-1 finishes.

I was cautiously optimistic about my ability to pick up some points here and excited about the possibility of Matt or Justin making a great run and
qualifying for Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir.

My draft deck in the second day was nothing special. I started with Shamanic Revelation and took some removal spells and card advantage in the form of a
pair of Sudden Reclamations. I was trying to build Abzan control, but my only black card of note was Sultai Emissary, and I didn’t have any lands after the
first pack. I ended up navigating into G/W splash red and black control with decent mana. The deck felt like it had a reasonable curve, reasonable mana,
and a reasonable plan, but the power level was decidedly average.

I somehow managed a 3-0 with this deck, beating two other better control decks that each had Duneblast, partially by sideboarding into more random big
creatures (like Tusked Colostodon and Venerable Lammasu), and partially because they kept revealing Duneblast off Scout the Borders rather than drawing it.

For what it’s worth, this is a spot where I felt like I really got rewarded for my approach to sideboarding in Limited. Both of them left several 2/1, 0/5,
or 1/5 creatures in their decks that didn’t do anything in the matchup because that’s just how you build control decks, while I knew they’d never end a
game early and just cut anything I had that was low impact in a long game (even though they had 2/1s, I cut Arashin Cleric, and I also cut Canyon Lurkers
and Mardu Warshrieker that would just trade or get outclassed). Their best cards were better than mine, but they had far more effective blanks than I did,
so I was just able to overwhelm them on density of relevant threats.

I won the next three matches after my draft, putting me up to nine wins in a row, and now Justin (who had also 3-0’d his draft), and I were very close to
making the top 8 and hoping to keep dodging each other.

We got paired in round fourteen. As we walked toward the match, Justin asked if I wanted to draw. I declined. I’d seen too many people try that and have it
not work out. I didn’t even know for sure if we’d be in with a win if we drew, and I knew that each of us wouldn’t draw with someone else if we’d gotten
paired against anyone else, because it wouldn’t have made sense, so it didn’t really seem to make sense now. Besides, if we played, we’d almost certainly
put one in the top 8. Wasn’t that good enough? Why risk it? Justin still wanted to draw, but first, he asked about a prize split if we weren’t going to
draw. That was easy to accept–I know the money mattered to him and not to me, and he didn’t want to increase variance, and I don’t care, so of course we
can just split the money. 50/50. I realized that another cost to splitting was that it was just throwing away pro point equity, and I care a lot about pro
points.

So we sat down to our feature match and played. Justin mulliganed and I kept a hand that could be explosive if I found a bounce land. I failed for several
turns, and Justin managed to make a Titan and threatened to kill me on the next turn. I drew a bounce land, which let me cast Hive Mind, then another Hive
Mind and Pact of Negation, so that Justin would have to pay for that Pact and the Summoner’s Pact he’d cast on his turn, which he couldn’t do, and I won
the first game.

I was up a game, a single game away from making my third Pro Tour top 8, a huge accomplishment that felt massively important to my legacy moving forward,
but I wasn’t even really happy about being up a game. I didn’t want to beat Justin.

I think Justin’s lived with me since before my first Pro Tour–certainly right around then, and we’ve gotten a lot closer lately. He recently stopped
working and focused on Magic, organized my cards to make it easier for us to prepare, and put countless hours into helping me prepare for the World
Championships. He convinced me to play Amulet Bloom and taught me how, and this was his first Pro Tour. Making the top 8 would be an awesome story, and it
would catapult him onto the pro Magic scene. This finish for him would mean that he wouldn’t need a job, and he could start going to GPs with me. He could
stop playing PTQs or PPTQs and we could focus on all the same tournaments. I’d thought about asking him to concede–I knew that I was playing for points
and for the top 8, and he was playing for money, and if I got the win, I could easily make the money up to him. But up a game, I realized that the finish
was actually more important to him, even if I didn’t think he appreciated that yet.

Still, up a game, knowing what the top 8 would mean for me, I couldn’t just give that up. I told him if he won the next game, we could draw, and I mostly
hoped he would.

So he won, and we drew. Afterward, people told us what a horrible EV decision it was, about how Justin might have been able to make it in with a loss, or
whatever else. I don’t think either of us thinks any of that matters at all. We definitely didn’t know exactly what a win, loss, or draw would mean for
each of us, but most likely, we were in with a win, out with a loss, and had a chance with a draw. Neither of us wanted to be the one to take that chance
away from the other, and we both wanted to share the top 8 more than anything.

This Pro Tour had really been about our friendship more than anything else–I’d chosen not to work with The Pantheon so that I could try to help Matt and
Justin qualify for Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir in San Jose, and so that I could help them prepare for this Pro Tour. We’d spent weeks preparing together,
and for both of us, it reminded us of times in the past when we’d spent weeks working together on something–In 2006, he and I traveled all over the
country together playing Dreamblade, a short lived WOTC game, together, and spent most of our downtime preparing for tournaments with each other, and more
recently, we’d gone to Irvine together as a team to do some consulting work for Cryptozoic, and we’ve always worked really well together. Being put in the
position of directly weighing our friendship and the importance of his success against one of the most important moments in my life for reaching my highest
goal, to someday make the Magic Hall of Fame, really helped appreciate how important that is. And despite losing for top 8 to Jesse Hampton, learning that
Justin had won, it felt like everything went as well as it could if we hadn’t drawn. I had no regrets, and I was just happy for Justin.

I don’t know exactly who I’m going to work with for Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir, but I know I’ll work with Justin, and I know I’ll work with him for
Memphis, and Miami, and Cleveland, and… life is good.