This is a reworking of an old article of mine, from 2007, for a Spanish magazine called Mirari. Of course, the information is entirely relevant to the modern day, and the examples are all up to date. This article is about preparing for a Grand Prix — or any event, really — and what I think is the best method to pick your deck, as well as the important things to do once you have made your choice, so you have the best chance to win.
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So, you have decided to go to a Grand Prix. You’ve got your ride or plane ticket, you have a place to stay, and you’ve convinced all your friends to go with you. There is only one thing missing — you don’t have a clue what you are going to play. It’s not a problem — you still have two weeks, so you’ll easily be able to figure it out.
One week has passed. You still don’t have a clue. Your friend Josh told you about a deck he has designed. He swears it’s the best deck, but you don’t see how he wins a game with it. You abandon the idea of building a deck of your own — you won’t have time to test or perfect it by the time the tourney comes.
There are three days left until the tournament. You are starting to get desperate. You scroll through the Japanese decklists of the last GP, but as there is no time to platytest you don’t have a clue of whether they are good or not. Is this deck really that good, or is it Shuhei Nakamura that is really good? Would you win with the same deck? Maybe you should just play whatever Tomoharo Saitou played; after all, he is a beatdown player, and you like beatdown too… But what if he made any changes to his deck?
Two days left. You are starting to wish you had worked on this a little earlier. Now, even if you find a deck, you are sure to not play it a lot before the tournament. You are starting to wish you had had a plan — you are starting to wish you knew how to prepare yourself in this aspect because, as you now noticed, this is not as easy as it seems.
Don’t panic, though, this is all hypothetical. It is, however, a very common situation in which I’ve placed myself many times. It’s something I have been trying to avoid lately, for obvious reasons. While I can’t really tell you what the best Standard deck is — and this is not really the purpose of this article — I can give you some hints on how to prepare yourself and play a reasonably good deck.
The first step on deciding what you want to play — and what to playtest it again once you do — is to figure out the metagame. The metagame is the whole group of decks in the tournament, and the amount of each deck, and it should be your guide both for playtesting and for figuring out what you aim to beat. The Jund Ramp deck, for example, is outstanding in an aggro-filled metagame, but it would be pretty bad in a Five-Color Control metagame. There are many ways to figure the metagame — the easiest one is to look at previous important tournaments of the same format. The next GPs — Barcelona, Seattle, and São Paulo – are Standard, so you should probably take a look at all the important events before those. If you are playing in Seattle and São Paulo, it’s a lot easier, since you can just watch Barcelona, but if you are playing in Barcelona, things get a little trickier. Your best bet is probably looking at the Regionals decks, or reading as many articles as you can. It’s also relevant to look at the results from Magic Online, now that the set is out there as well — it might be good to even look at the Top 8 of the Qualifier tournament — though it doesn’t have Alara Reborn, it sets standards anyway.
You have to remember, while defining a metagame, that whatever you think is the best deck doesn’t really matter to other people. I think the RW Boat Brew deck is terrible and I’d probably never play it myself, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to consider it, because other people will be playing it, and if I’m not ready, they will beat me. This is why you have to have a grasp of the metagame first — you must know what other people think, what other people play. Your opinion, while figuring the metagame, is completely irrelevant.
After you’ve figured what the metagame is going to be, and only then, you have to either pick the deck that you believe to have the most chance against this metagame, or build one that tries to beat the most popular decks. This can range from relevant to defining, depending on how open the metagame is. In Affinity times, the metagame was obvious and non-changing — if you picked a deck that lost to Affinity, you would lose most of your matches. Fortunately, Standard of today is not like that — there are many decks, and they are all close in power level, so you can have some room for personal preferences. The consensus “best deck” of the format, BW Tokens, is one of those decks that are 50-50ish against almost everything, so you have a lot of options in choosing your deck because few decks flat out lose to it. Back when Faeries was the most popular deck, I believed it was suicidal to play something like Reveillark because you just couldn’t beat it — nowadays, even if you decide to play a Red deck, which is a good matchup for BW, you can always still beat it.
If you know that there is going to be a most popular deck (and I believe it’s going to be BW, with GW decks also putting up good numbers, which is good because the strategy is quite similar), then the most obvious pick is the deck with the best results against what you are going to expect, and you should consider it even if you don’t like it. Give it a try — it might turn out to be better than you imagine. I originally hated Enduring Ideal decks, but it seemed to beat everything and I gave it a try — I ended up winning Nationals with a deck that I didn’t like the week before. It’s also relevant to know what the most popular deck is so that you don’t suffer splash damage from it — if the most popular decks are the token decks, it seems silly to play a deck that is not a token deck but also suffers from sweepers like Volcanic Fallout and Jund Charm.
There are a couple of factors you should also consider. One of them is the number of Byes you’ve got. I’ll honestly tell you that Byes are a huge part of a GP, and you should do whatever you can to get Bye 3 — it is much better than Bye 2. The reason for that is that Bye is considered to be the perfect opponent in tiebreakers, and having Bye 3 means that not only you have three extra wins, but that you will likely finish better than the people with the same score but fewer byes. If you don’t have Bye 3 and lose an early round, it’s just disastrous for the breakers because all your subsequent opponents are going to have a worse record.
Right now, tiebreakers don’t matter for Day 2, so if your goal is just to make Day 2, they are completely irrelevant, but your goal should never be to just make Day 2. For Top 8 and Top 16, they are still very useful. In GP: Singapore, places 7-12 were tied, and so were places 16-29. Because I had Bye 3, I was able to sneak in 16th place, and I’d have won the invite to the Pro Tour if that was my goal, and missed it if I didn’t have Bye 3. In Kobe, 4-10 had the same points, and so did 11-18 — for a lot of people, those tiebreakers made all the difference. Granted, having Bye 3 does not guarantee the best tiebreakers — I’ve finished 9th on GPs with Bye 3 — but it’s about the only thing you do to control it (besides winning all your matches), so it seems silly not to try your hardest. So, if you ever have the option of fighting for Bye 3, do it — it’s much better than Bye 2.
The effect Byes have on your deck choice are obvious — the later the rounds, the better the competition, and therefore the better the decks you’ll play against. By having Bye 3 or 2, you are usually able to escape from the so called “jungle” part of the tournament — the one you can expect anything. The metagame is much more open at the first tables – if you start the tournament 0-1, you are much more likely to play against Mono Green Aggro than if you start it 3-0 in a Standard GP. That means you shouldn’t play a deck that can’t beat random decks like Mono Green Aggro (or just random creature decks in general) if you don’t have Byes, but having a bad matchup against it is forgivable if you have Bye 3. The mere fact that you don’t play as many matches means you have a little less chance of facing whatever your worst matchup happens to be, so you can gamble a bit more. I wouldn’t play a deck with win/lose matchups without Byes. I’d prefer a deck that does so-so against everything.
There is also a saying about better players liking Control decks — I have to say that, for the most part, it’s true. You’ll see a lot more Control in the later rounds, when people come off Byes, and therefore you should put control heavier or lower in your priorities scale depending on the number of Byes you’ve got.
The time is also an issue when deciding your deck. I remember reading an article from Zvi Mowshowitz a long time ago explaining that, though they had the best sideboard for the UW mirror match, they couldn’t really employ it to it’s fullest extent because the first game would take so long they wouldn’t have the time. If you are a slow player, you shouldn’t pick the slowest deck or you’ll risk drawing and — once you do — you’ll run into other slow decks/players and you’ll likely draw even more. Or you can alternatively add other kill conditions, so your games finish faster, but I advise against that — if you can’t play a deck fast enough, don’t play it — you shouldn’t make it worse by trying to make it faster (unless, of course, it’s still better than anything else).
It’s also relevant to know what you like, and what you know how to play. Some people always play control and some people always play aggro — I don’t think this is a good thing, as you should be prepared to play whatever is the best deck for the tournament, but you should still be aware of your limitations. You can’t just decide to play Elves one day before the tournament and think you’re going to do well with it if you’ve never played anything similar, so if you choose to play Elves and have never done that before, you have to do that early.
Say, somehow, you decide on a deck. You might not end up playing it, but you’ll tweak it and play with it so you have an idea if you like it or not. The first thing you do with a deck is run it through what is called “The Gauntlet.” The Gauntlet is the group of the most common decks (which you already know, because you’ve studied the metagame). You should play a few games against all of them to see if you get satisfactory results, changing opponents if you are able.
People have different “rules” on how to playtest. Some like to play it as strict as tournaments. Others, like Mike Flores, allow one takeback per game (that is, you realize you’ve made a mistake that, given the information you have available, you wouldn’t make if you had thought better, and so you make the correct play instead… but only once). I prefer to play it as lousy as possible — you may get advice from nearby people, and you make as many takebacks as you want per match, if you can prove that the other play would be correct at the time you made it. My reasoning for this is that if you decide to play the deck at the tournament, you’ll play it optimally by then — you’ll have tested, played a lot with it against all the matchups, and you’ll be much more focused. You are testing the deck to see whether you should play it at the tournament or not, so your testing should reflect your tournament conditions of not making as many mistakes as you do during playtesting. If you are losing during the testing because you aren’t making the right plays, you’ll fool yourself to the deck’s ability and you’ll never come to play it properly because you gave up on it too soon. The playtesting is there to show the power of the deck, not you.
If I had to run a deck through the Standard Gauntlet today, I’d play it against the following decks:
BW Tokens
GW Tokens
Jund Ramp
Five-Color Control of most varieties
Mono-Red and its varieties (RG, BR, Rgb)
Faeries
Reveillark builds
BW Kithkin
RW Boat Brew
I believe the first four are the most important, so I’d put more weight on them.
Once you’ve gone through the Gauntlet, you can decide if you want to play that deck or not. If you decide not to, you have to repeat the whole process, though you now have additional information because you’ve been playing against the deck you might play. If you decide to play the deck (and I recommend some time in advance for that, though it’s not that important), you should play what you think are the troublesome matchups again, and discuss with your friends whether you could have played differently at critical points. In fact, it’s important that you recognize the critical points. It might be “turn 4, because he might have Wrath of God,” or “having Bitterblossom in play on turn 2,” but you should always know what has to happen for you to lose or win a game, because it gives you a game plan. This comes from playtesting. It’s important to note that it’s useful to play the opposing decks at least once or twice — you might be sure you are not going to play GW, but it’s still valid to play some games with it to know how it plays, what it fears, what doesn’t concern you, and to make sure the player is not making the results lopsided.
You shouldn’t neglect the sideboard, either. There is usually little to no time to playtest all the matches sideboarded, so you might do what I do most of the time, and discuss the sideboarding strategies. It’s important that, when you arrive at the tournament, you know what you are sideboarding in and out in every match. It is also important to know why you are doing that, in case your opponent is playing a slightly different deck and you have to adapt, but you’ll probably do fine with a sideboarding guide. You should not, by any means, go to a tournament without knowing what you are taking out against the Gauntlet decks. Removing “one of each,” despite being your best bet when you are in trouble because you have the less chance to ruin everything, is not good enough for your whole tournament.
One thing I do very little, and I believe I’m right in not doing it much, is playing with the sideboard. Not that it’s bad — if you have all the time in the world, by all means do that — but I think time is much better spent in playing pre-sideboarded matches. Sometimes I’ll play a few games with friends and they’ll want to play with the sideboard, but I believe you cannot sideboard properly if you don’t really know the matchup, so it’s pointless to start doing it soon. Once you do know the matchup perfectly, then it doesn’t take long to figure out a sideboard. Besides, if you play BW versus GW sideboarded, that testing is going to be restricted to the GW versus BW with sideboard matchup, whereas if you just play BW versus GW you’ll have a better understanding of your deck in all the matches, so it’s more useful. All in all, I’m a big fan of just theorizing the sideboard – which you can only do after you know everything about your deck and the matchup — and I have to say it’s worked well for me so far, since I always like the sideboards I play.
I guess this is it for today – I hope you were able to get something out of it. I’m leaving for Barcelona soon, so you can probably expect a report next week. See you in Barcelona, Seattle, Hawaii, or São Paulo, or I guess here next week if you aren’t going to any of those tournaments…
Wish me luck!
PV