Magic Online has once again aligned with real life in an awkward way. The frenzy about Standard is over, and the Block Constructed show is about to get underway for real. Unfortunately, the information goldmine usually provided by Magic Online was taken out by the slew of Future Sight release events. Absent real data to look and real decks to tweak, I’ve decided to muse on a less concrete topic this week.
Choosing what deck you play in a given tournament is a fairly individual process; everyone goes about it differently. However, there are some basic categories into which most of these processes fall. Given that I tried to sell most people I talked to before Regionals on the idea of “play the deck you know,” I figured I’d try to sell it to you, too.
Play What You Know
In the weeks leading up to Regionals, I had a large number of conversations with people regarding what decks we were all going to run on the big day. There were talks of just playing “the best deck,” debates over specific card choices in fairly stock decks, and endless nights spent scouring various Magic websites looking for the latest tech. I was as engaged in this as everyone else, even though I knew the whole time that I would wind up playing a Dredge deck.
The fact of the matter was that I didn’t really want to play a Dredge deck, since I’d been playing one on Magic Online for the better part of 2007 and I wanted something new. I played Dredge on something resembling auto-pilot; I didn’t make mindless choices, but there were no new situations I needed to figure out. Of course, this is the exact reason why I knew that, when Regionals rolled around, I’d be sitting down with Dredge.
The Massachusetts Regional Championships are practically guaranteed to be nine rounds long. Given that, to make the Top 8, you need to win seven of your first eight rounds, why would you ever put yourself into a position where you needed to constantly be figuring out how to win in this position? I knew that fewer players were going to qualify with Dredge than with Solar Flare or Gruul, but I also knew that my chances were better with Dredge. Winning 87.5% of your matches is only made harder if you have to re-determine your path to victory every step of the way. Playing the deck that I’d played for months meant that I would not fatigue, and therefore would be able to play my best game all day long.
This generalization applies to nearly everyone. Playing the deck that you know how to play best is usually a better idea than playing the deck everyone else says is superior. The format has to develop in a certain way for this to be the case, but today’s Standard is exactly what I’m talking about. Adhering to the deck you like is a great strategy for big tournaments in a wide-open field. Pre-Regionals I predicted that I wouldn’t play against more than one copy of any archetype all day. If I had thought that I would play against four Gruul decks, three Dragonstorm decks, and one Dralnu deck, then I would not necessarily have been served as well by a deck that was good because of its familiarity. Instead I would (hopefully) have chosen a deck that knocked Gruul and Dragonstorm out of the water, even if it folded to everything else.
However, today’s Standard format is not 50% Gruul and 35% Dragonstorm. Watching Magic Online Premiere Event replays will tell you that in just a few minutes, as will looking at the decklists page for U.S. Regionals. Wizards of the Coast has been working to even out the power levels of most cards, and the result is that there are a huge number of decks that you can bring to a tournament, and wind up walking away with the trophy. The 84 Nationals-qualifying decklists that were posted on MagictheGathering.com by the beginning of this weekend included 30 distinct archetypes. Only four archetypes won more than four slots (Gruul, Solar Flare, Dragonstorm, and Project X). Standard is wide open.
When you’re staring a wide-open format in the face, metagaming is no longer an option. Even if you could build a deck that had a 90% matchup against Gruul, Solar Flare, Dragonstorm, and Project X at the cost of a 10% matchup against the rest of the field, you would still only expect to win five of your first eight matches. You’re much better off taking the deck that you’ve been playing for the past three months and entering the tournament with that. As long as you have (correctly) determined that your deck is reasonable, individual matchups do not hold much weight. When you can’t win just by choosing the format’s best deck, you need to win by choosing your best deck.
Overwhelming Technology
There is, however, an exception to the above. Sometimes, a deck comes along that is just so good that you need to drop what you’re playing and pick it up. It doesn’t matter if the format has three Tier 1 decks or if it has thirty Tier 1 decks; if you beat them all, then you beat them all. Most of the tournament preparation that I did for Regionals was digging for the piece of tech that would become the deck with 90% matchups against the entire field.
On the day of Regionals, I was sure that I had found that deck. No Fear had won or split something in the region of fifteen queues in a row for me, with my only game loss coming at the hands of a mulligan to one. I had beaten Leylines and I had beaten seven-card hands with my own two-card hands. I had won games that just looked impossible to win, even as I played them out. Since then, the deck has not done as well. I told the story of my not-quite-there Regionals last week, and while I’ve been doing well on Magic Online I have not been the unstoppable force I once was. However, I have experienced the real thing twice before.
The most recent of the two events was a Honolulu PTQ in Butler, Pennsylvania. I was already qualified for the PT, but my roommates weren’t yet, and obviously I wanted them to come with me. One of them, nicknamed Silent Steve, had made the finals of two previous PTQs with Dredge-a-Tog, and was ready to fire at the Butler PTQ with Tog yet again. I’d been spending a ton of time on Magic Online, messing around with any deck I could get the cards for.
My clan was putting some work into the Ichorid deck that had shown up just a day or two before, and at some point we ran into someone who cast Tolarian Winds on turn 1 and flipped over 24 cards. We thought it was pretty funny that you could kill someone with free 3/1s, massive Psychatogs, or even flying Grave-Trolls, so we spent a little time tinkering with it. We ended up with a version that had three different incarnations (Wonder, Filth, and Anger) and Life from the Loam, so it could produce Togs and Trolls even when it cast a Tolarian Winds. I proxied the deck out and brought it to FNM, where I crushed everyone else over and over again, until I handed the deck over to Silent Steve so that he could try it out.
Steve abandoned his Dredge-a-Tog deck and went to Butler with our Ichorid deck. Another friend of mine walked into the room with a more traditional version of the deck, while a third guy that no one knew was playing the only other Ichorid deck in the room. Ten hours later, Steve and my other friend were playing out the finals to see who could go to Honolulu.
Earlier that year, I had been ready to go on a double-header PTQ road trip with my Kamigawa Block Constructed White Weenie deck. I was playing a deck that was based on the one Adam Yurchick and Sean Inlow had top-eighted with in Minneapolis, and I’d been doing tremendously well on Magic Online. The sideboard had caught so many MTGO opponents off-guard that I figured I would be able to pull the same stunts in Ohio.
The night before I left on the trip, though, a CMU teammate told me about the deck he’d used to qualify the week before. He’d taken the Blue/Green Sakura-Tribe Scout deck and splashed Red into it for Godo. He’d also found that Oboro Envoy bought you the time you needed against aggro decks, or completely shut down them down when it was backed up by Sakura-Tribe Scout. I threw the deck together on Magic Online, played in two queues, and was immediately convinced. I managed to borrow the 71 cards I needed (Jitte goes in every deck, obviously) just before we left on Saturday.
I made the Top 8 of the Saturday PTQ without losing a single game. In the quarterfinals I won the coin-flip, which was pretty lucky since the player on the play cast a third-turn six-drop all three games, while the player on the draw scrambled to try to keep up. In the semifinals, I played against a White Weenie opponent who just couldn’t manage to get through Keiga, as I kept slipping Legendary lands into play with Sakura-Tribe Scout during his attack step. In the finals, my opponent didn’t want to go to the Pro Tour, and he was willing to split everything down the middle and give me the slot. I handed my deck over to the driver of our caravan, and he made the Top 8 on Sunday, before falling to the mirror in the quarterfinals.
Most playtesting that people do is not the well-controlled determination of the deck with the format’s highest expected value. It is the hope that this new deck they’re trying out will prove to be the next unstoppable juggernaut. A happy side effect that may occur is finding out that one deck just does better than the rest and that’s the one you’ll spend your time on, but everyone knows that the reason you’re playtesting yet again is that you hope to find today’s Ichorid.
The Scientific Method
This last category is only here for the sake of completeness. I have heard of people who are dedicated and patient enough to put together a gauntlet and then run ten pre-board and ten post-board games of every gauntlet deck against every gauntlet deck, but few PTQ players can afford the time and energy this requires. The PTQ season is too fluid for this process, since one tournament can change the face of the entire format. While running five hundred games of Magic might be “worth it” for a two-month PTQ season, what was the best deck at the beginning of the season might not even be Tier 1 three weeks later.
To take advantage of a strict playtesting regimen, you really need to be preparing for one large tournament. Regionals was actually a very good example of this; preparation could be started over a month ahead of time, and there was no Regionals Season where tech could evolve. If you got everything right, then you got everything right.
The problem, however, is that this process also needs a small metagame. Let’s say that I decided that I was going to run a gauntlet before Regionals. I would have chosen to include Dragonstorm, Dralnu, Gruul, Zoo, Pickles, Solar Flare, Project X, and Bridge Dredge in my gauntlet, and 980 games later I would have walked away with a nearly worthless result. In my Regionals, I played against three of those decks over four matches. Half of the rounds I played were against other decks. Adding B/W Aggro, Black Rack, Mono-White Control, and B/W/r Control to my gauntlet would have brought it up to 11 decks, for 121 matchups, for 2,420 games of testing. The gauntlet approach only works when tier-one is small.
At this point I feel like I’ve rambled on for long enough. Hopefully I’ve been able to convey the idea that my ideal playtest process right now is to just play a deck I’m interested in through a handful of Magic Online Premiere Events (or FNMs) and see how smoothly everything runs. And if you get a little lucky, every once in a while you’ll stumble across something that blows the opposition out of the water.
As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me in the forums, via email, or on AIM.
Benjamin Peebles-Mundy
ben at mundy dot net
SlickPeebles on AIM