Friday night. Indianapolis. GenCon.
Camera pans in from the street, headed for a window on the fourth floor of the Hampton Inn. A depleted bag of Cheez-Its relaxes on a messed-up bed while a six-foot redhead male glares at the sixty-card deck lying next to it.
“I swear to God,” the figure growls, “those decks all scoop to White Weenie.”
The redhead in question has just gone 1-2 drop in the first of two GenCon PTQs, his last chances to qualify for Pro Tour: Los Angeles. His losses were to a Blue/Green countermagic deck designed to beat slow control decks, and to a Blue/Green/Red Thoughts of Ruin deck designed to beat…slow control decks. The Sensei’s Divining Tops and Kodama’s Reaches in his sixty-card stack were unhappy to learn of this development.
A cartoon devil appears in a puff of smoke over the redhead’s left shoulder.
“’Ey, kid. You know why those decks didn’t get knocked out by White Weenie like you planned? ‘Cause White Weenie didn’t show. You got White Weenie in your deck box over there. Take it out and punish them.”
As if on cue, a cartoon angel pops up over his right shoulder.
“No! You just spent the past four days in the car playtesting against White Weenie. You have almost no experience with that deck. Remember what happened the last time you went into a PTQ without testing your deck first?”
The devil grunts. “Doesn’t matter. Remember the last time you even top eighted a PTQ this season? What was it, a month ago? You can’t beat those Blue decks. Not with what’s in those sleeves right now. Go over there and pick up that White Weenie deck.”
“Don’t do it,” the angel says. “This is your last chance. This is no time for fancy tricks or getting dangerous. Just tighten up and win the PTQ.”
…
Hey, guys!
Richard here. Today was my first day at GenCon and man am I having a good time. Tomorrow is my first PTQ (got another one the day after), but today is nothing but relaxing and goofing off.
I’ve never been to GenCon before, but let me tell you — it’s a great time for exactly the type of person who’d pay money to read a Magic site.
Today I’ve seen people pay to have their friends arrested by Klingons and hauled off to jail in the middle of crowded exhibit halls. I’ve seen dice the size of…well, me. Swords, armor, models (and miniatures, too!), Magical artists signing cards left and right…cool stuff all over the place.
I eventually wandered into a gigantic roomful of people playing Magic. Nice!
I saw a few familiar faces. Several St. Louis-area players were in attendance, including Tim “T. Galbs” Galbiati, the inimitable Josh Smith, and the big guy himself, the man known only as Ogre. I wandered over to the Type I area, watched Steve Menendian wreck with Gifts Ungiven for a little bit, then realized who was seated at the next table down — none other than the very owner of the store where I play (Ogre’s Cards), and SCG’s most recent Power Nine champion — Robert Vroman.
This was probably the highlight of my weekend. The game I watched was the Stax mirror, and Vroman was facing down a Smokestack in play with two soot counters on it. Vroman had just dropped a Goblin Welder, about to break the game wide open…or so it seemed. His opponent untapped and added a third counter to his ‘Stack, then popped one of Vroman’s lands with a Wasteland. Crucible of Worlds recurred the Wasteland to drop both Vroman and his opponent to exactly three permanents, leaving each player about to be wiped out by the triple-countered Smokestack, including Vroman’s freshly-cast Welder.
Cool as ice, Vroman untapped. He put the “sacrifice three permanents” ability on the stack, aimed the Goblin Welder at one of his Moxen, and fanned out his graveyard. My eyes bugged out when he flipped in none other than… Solemn Simulacrum! The Mountain that Jens brought in upped Vroman’s permanent count to four, allowing him to sacrifice everything but his Welder, and forcing his opponent to lose everything to his own Smokestack while leaving Vroman with an active Welder on an otherwise empty table. Game over.
Type I is such an awesome spectator sport.
Anyway, so later that night I met some of my roommate Paul’s friends from Wisconsin. We headed out to a bar called the Ram, then Paul and I were taught how to play Star Wars Miniatures. Fun game, that! I…
…Right, Magic website. Sorry, it’s hard to talk about GenCon with unrelated stories slipping in. Seriously, go check it out next year if you’ve never been.
Anyway, so it’s the night before the tournament, and I’m faced with the momentous decision of sticking with a Kodama’s Reach-based deck I know to be strong, despite all the hate I’ve seen (and lost to) at the first PTQ, or making a last-minute metagame call and switching to White Weenie.
Magic is so hard.
Round 1: Jesse Claudio, playing Mono-Red
I win the die roll, and lead with Plains into Isamaru, Hound of Konda.
I have hit a new low.
Bear in mind that I’ve never even taken an aggro deck to a PTQ in my life, let alone one I haven’t tested with. I compiled my list about thirty minutes before the tournament, the shortest amount of preparation time I’ve ever put into any Magic tournament, ever. I decided to maindeck three Hokori, one Shining Shoal, two Charge Across the Araba, and four Manriki-Gusari. This seemed like a good way to maximize my chances of drawing the important cards in both the mirror and against control decks…
…Or something. Really I guess the best explanation would be, “It made sense to me at the time.”
Anyway, my metagame call pays off from the get-go; I am paired against an anti-Gifts deck round one. Yay!
Game one I take four extra Zo-Zu damage I don’t need to because I keep laying lands to enable Charge Across the Araba, and he burns me out before I can finish him off.
The cartoon angel pops up back over my right shoulder.
“See? Had you tested, you would have known not to keep playing lands there. He would have come up short on burn had you not gone for the Charge.”
In games two and three, I draw Opal-Eye and Samurai of the Pale Curtain. These are two cards that Mono-Red really, really does not want to see. Opal-Eye is a nightmare for a deck whose creatures and removal are all damage-based, and Pale Curtain trades in combat with no man in the Red deck. Several pieces of cheap equipment show up and do their thing as well, and before I know it I’m on to round two.
“See?” chuckles the devil. “Now aren’t you glad you left those Kodama’s Reaches at home?”
The angel looks grumpy. “Lucky start. See if it lasts.”
1-0
Round 2: Tyson Swigart, playing W/R Godo
We start this round with a deck check. No biggie. Tyson and I chat a bit while this is happening, then get our time extension and shuffle up.
We each play a turn 1 Isamaru, which is amusing as both of us were relying on the Hound to get our early beats in. Hokori is my next creature, and he locks the board down for awhile as a stream of my smaller guys get in for a solid amount of damage. Eventually I manage to push through Tyson’s larger blockers and take home game one.
I look at my sideboard. Er…what do I do here?
I decide to bring in Celestial Kirin, Patron of the Kitsune, Opal-Eye, and Charge Across the Araba. Again, I can’t really recreate my thought process except to say that this seemed like a good idea at the time.
Game two Tyson plays out Yosei and Godo (fetching Tatsumasa) into my board of Celestial Kirin and five land. This works out well when I lay my sixth and tap out for a Shining Shoal that wipes out nearly his entire board. He draws two more copies of Yosei, but I match his draw by pulling up both my copies of Patron of the Kitsune, which hook up with the Kirin to knock out the dragons and keep us locked in a topdeck war. I finally pull an Eight-and-a-Half-Tails to break the stalemate and advance to round three.
2-0
Round 3: Tim Kincaid, playing Mono-Blue Ninjas
We get deck checked again this round. Twice in a row, eh? What are the odds? No worries; my deck comes back clean once again.
Now ordinarily Tim would have a tactical advantage here, since he is playing a deck I would never in my wildest dreams have tested against. Luckily I planned ahead and didn’t test at all, negating his advantage entirely. Ha!
I get a quick Jitte draw in game one, and he doesn’t have an answer. Tournament report writers gotta love that card — it lets you get away with describing games in entire sentences (“I had Jitte and he didn’t; you know the drill.”), while leaving you the option of ranting about how dumb it is for an entire paragraph. Such flexibility!
Game two we trade Jittes, I use Otherworldly Journey to steal back a guy he snatched with Threads of Disloyalty, and then he gets Higure and Deep Hours going. We are trading blows, and are both fairly low, when he taps down to one mana to activate Higure twice, making the Legendary Ninja and his Deep Hours partner unblockable. At four life, this five-power attack would be lethal…if not for the Shining Shoal I have been holding back. I stack combat damage, Shoal Higure’s damage to Deep Hours…and disaster strikes: Tim Ninjitsus in Mistblade Shinobi.
This should have given my Shoal an illegal target and ended the game, except — fortunately for me — the Ninja Tim returned was Higure, not Deep Hours. Since Shining Shoal’s wording meant it was actually targeting Ninja of the Deep Hours, bouncing Higure did not make the spell fizzle as he had intended. Instead it resolved, so the attack left me alive and deadly, ready to seal the deal next turn.
3-0
Round 4: Sam Friedman, playing Black Hand
Aha! Those four maindeck Manriki-Gusari should come in handy here.
(Not as much as my opponent’s maindeck Raving Oni-Slaves will against my Otherworldly Journeys, though. Mise! Looks like another fellow gunning for Gifts Ungiven.)
…Oh right, almost forgot. We get deck checked again this round. That’s three deck checks in four rounds. What are the odds?
We each play a Hand of our respective colors, but I get Manriki-Gusari advantage and beat down using my three-power Hand and my opponent’s lower life total (thanks, Oni-Slave!) to win the race.
In game two I am pleasantly surprised to see that Raving Oni-Slave has not been boarded out. This is doubly good news, both because it means I get to play against it again, and also because it means my opponent did not have very much to board in against me — the Slave is almost always the first card to go in this matchup. In any case, the Slave’s drawback makes racing all but impossible once again, and I beat down with ease.
4-0
I catch word that this tournament is only six rounds, meaning that as one of two undefeated players, I am a lock for Top 8 already. Nice!
I intentionally draw in my next two rounds, grab some food, watch some Type I, and hand in my deck to the judges; they’re deck checking the whole Top 8. That would be my fourth deck check in one tournament, after having played exactly four matches of Magic. How strange.
Quarterfinals: Steve Walsh, playing Black Hand
One of my problems with Black Hand as a deck has always been that it is going into the White Weenie matchup with one hand tied behind its back. White Weenie’s drops are cheaper, generally just as big, and sometimes named Celestial Kirin. None of these are good news for Black Hand, and they generally mean that the black deck needs to compensate by bringing several extra-spicy weapons to fight WW, or else it’s stuck bringing knives to a gunfight.
Unfortunately for Steve, he has not brought guns to this fight. Instead, he is maindecking stuff like Sink into Takenuma. Once again, probably looking for a Gifts deck.
Game one I curve him out and drop Hokori. Game two he keeps a one-lander and doesn’t draw a second one in time. Just like that, it’s on to the semis.
5-0-2
The judges tell me to leave the Top 9 area immediately following the conclusion of my match, because “my opponent next round won’t get to watch me play, so I shouldn’t get to watch him play either.” Fair enough. I go hang out with fellow Top 8 competitor Jerret Rocha and a couple of his friends, including Star City’s most popular tournament report writer ever, Gadiel Szleifer.
Jerret and I both have good matchups in our next rounds, plus plenty of time on our hands because one of the Top 8 matches is an untimed Gifts mirror match, so we jokingly begin to discuss what will happen if we meet in the finals. I ask Jerret if he plans on going to the Pro Tour if he wins, and he says that he does. I, of course, have the same goal, so if we do meet in the finals it will be a duel to the death.
Semifinals: Justin Spack, playing G/U with Godo
Game one takes forever. Justin does exactly what these decks need to do in order to beat White Weenie: curve out with two accelerants into Meloku, and have the opponent not draw Jitte or Charge Across the Araba. At least I have Hokori and two Manriki-Gusari, so I am not quite out of it yet. We beat on each other for a bit, and I eventually get into a position where I can force Justin to sacrifice two chump blockers each turn, without being able to attack back for fear of lethal retribution from my onboard beaters.
The table judges are getting a bit cranky, because each of our turns is taking forever. To be fair, Meloku and Hokori will do that to you; one misstep from either of us, and the other guy’s attack is lethal. Unfortunately, the dance ends anticlimactically as on the penultimate turn I simply run out of land to re-equip Manriki-Gusari where I need to, and the Meloku tokens push through for exactly enough damage to kill me.
Game two I curve him out and play Hokori. Why can’t I just do that every game like a good player?
Game three I am poised to lay a turn 4 Hokori, except I stall on three land. Justin gets a Sakura-Tribe Scout into Meloku draw, so things are looking grim indeed. I find my fourth land, but playing Hokori now that Scout-Meloku is on the table is suicide, so I suck it up and leave the Dust Drinker in my hand. I decide to hold out for Jitte or Shining Shoal or a fifth land to enable the Charge Across the Araba I am holding. (Who knows? Maybe I can get him to block with Meloku.) I find a fifth land, play it, and swing with my team.
My opponent figures out that I am holding Charge, and in his zeal to block, he inadvertently declares Sakura-Tribe Elder as a blocker…before remembering to make Meloku tokens for my two flyers. One of my two Lantern Kamis goes unblocked, and since he is at five life, my Charge is lethal. As Jamie Wakefield would say, Super Lucky Guy — that’s me.
6-0-2
Finals: Jerret Rocha, playing G/U/R Thoughts of Ruin
Naturally!
I have a good time playing this match. Always in the back of my mind is the comforting fact that if I lose, I know that the slot will be going to a good player and a solid guy. Plus Jerret and I agree to split the prize right down the middle and just play for the invite itself, so it’s not like there is money on the line.
Game one Jerret powers out a Godo before I can beat him low enough to alpha strike around it. Godo fetches a Jitte, and as I am without a Jitte, Shining Shoal, or a Manriki-Gusari of my own to deal with it, I drop like a brick.
For most of game two I am holding Charge Across the Araba and staring at four lands in play. Jerret has to tap out several times to deal with my threats, meaning if I ever find the magical fifth to enable my several-times-over lethal Charge, the game is over. I eventually draw it…one turn after my board has been cleared by a channeled Jiwari. Oops.
After the match, Gadiel gives Jerret some hash about channeling the Jiwari on my turn (since if I had drawn a fifth land for Charge I could have blown him out), and several other spectators are quick to jump in and give the PTQ champ a hard time about it. They also insist I include it in my article, which I agree to and just did.
By the way, Jerret’s deck was pretty awesome and I’d recommend taking a look at it — you can find it right here in SCG’s deck database — if you’ve still got some PTQs to hit before the Pro Tour rolls around.
Me? I’m done.
Second place gets no kind of envelope, blue or otherwise, but I’m out of tournaments to try. There’s one more PTQ happening in Chicago this weekend (and of course a GP), but I won’t be able to make it to either.
Still, I’d like to leave you with what this PTQ season has taught me about…well, PTQ seasons in general.
This season made me realize that there’s a certain strategy to approaching PTQs as a whole that transcends the game of Magic itself. It’s more than just building a good deck or being a good player, or even figuring out what everyone else is playing. In the case of PTQ seasons in particular, the word meta-game refers to a lot more than just the field of decks in an environment.
Previously I’ve been lucky enough to just pick one deck and be able to tweak it to do well against the field as a season progresses, but that didn’t work out for me in Kamigawa block. I remained a disciple Kodama’s Reach even when more and more hate got thrown at me, and only when I figured out how beneficial a deck-swap would be did I reap the rewards of proper metagaming.
Another thing I learned in this season is not to overestimate my opponents. I have always had at least respect for my opponents, certainly, but until recently my assumptions about their skill levels had been…too high, I would say. Unrealistically so.
One of the main reasons I hadn’t jumped ship to White Weenie earlier in the season was that it “loses to Gifts.”
But does it really? That sentence is quite an oversimplification, really. “White Weenie loses to Gifts if both decks are played perfectly” would be more accurate. If the Gifts player is an absolute mastermind, he will almost certainly win. If he is less than an “extremely good,” the win percentage immediately drops. If the White Weenie player knows how to maneuver his troops to create opportunities for himself, the matchup gets even worse for Gifts. If the Gifts player hasn’t gotten enough sleep, it’s worse still for him.
In between rounds at this PTQ I wandered over to watch a Gifts player still working on his round, facing off against a White Weenie deck. The Gifts player was someone I knew, and certainly no fool; in fact if I were to mention his name I’m pretty sure most readers would recognize it. His situation was thus:
He’s facing down a 2/2 guy of some sort and a Lantern Kami equipped with a Jitte, which has two counters on it. He’s holding Kagemaro and…I want to say Gifts Ungiven, Exile into Darkness, and Swamp. His conundrum was essentially that Kagemaro wouldn’t kill the Lantern Kami by itself, and that the Lantern Kami would definitely kill him by itself in several turns if he didn’t do something about it. He had five lands in play and hadn’t laid his land for the turn, so he could definitely either play and activate the Kagemaro or play the Exile or Gifts on that turn. I think the Lantern Kami was lethal in two swings.
The play he ended up settling on was to cast the Exile to remove the 2/2 guy, with plans to recur it next turn and kill the Kami assuming the WW player didn’t have another three-or-less cost creature in his hand (which I think contained around three cards). This didn’t work out for him, since the guy had a second creature to put a buffer between the Lantern Kami and oblivion, letting it come in for another five and victory shortly thereafter.
I had a different play. I would have played Swamp and Kagemaro and said “go.” I would have taken the beats for one turn, then wrathed on end step via Kagemaro. Lantern Kami would naturally pump to avoid this, but that would leave it as the only remaining creature on the table heading into my next main phase. I’d then Exile the Lantern Kami to clear his board, leaving me admittedly vulnerable to Hokori but still much better off than “losing outright.” I pointed this out to the Gifts player after the match and he agreed that he probably would not have lost had he done that instead.
Gifts is a hard deck to pilot. If my opponents play it as well as my playtest partners do in a no-pressure situation where takebacks are allowed, I have reason to assume I’ll lose to it…but in the hands of your average PTQ player? That’s being generous.
So here are the metagame choices I made over the course of this season, and how they worked out for me.
Week 1 (Tsuyoshi Fujita’s G/U/R Honor-Worn Shaku deck):
Finished with a 3-2-1 record. Played the deck because it tested well against the other decks from the PT, and because I learned about the tournament with very little time left to test.
Week 2 (Rob.dec):
Switched to this deck and finished with a 6-2-1 record. Beat up on White Weenie all day, lost to a hateful Black Hand deck in the Swiss, and got knocked out of the Top 9 by two consecutive “oops, I lose” draws.
Week 3 (Rob.dec):
Decided to stick with my deck, as WW was still the top deck and I still had a fantastic matchup against it. Finished with a 3-2 record. Lost to Rich Hoaen’s Heartbeat deck, which I had never seen before, and spoiled my 5-0 match record with my first-ever loss to White Weenie.
Week 4 (Rob.dec):
Finished with a 1-2 record. Lost to the same White Weenie guy I lost to last week, and then to a kid playing White Weenie because somehow I let his age convince me I could get away without playing tightly. (Remember how that matchup’s only good if the Gifts player plays it well?)
Week 5 (Rob.dec):
I don’t let my losses last week sway me from playing this deck, since they had little to do with the deck and everything to do with the player. Still, I dropped from this tournament with a 2-2 record. Lost to U/G and a hateful Black Hand deck.
(By the way — I didn’t mention this earlier because I didn’t want it to distract readers from the rest of the tournament report, but I was convinced by certain people to play Rich Hoaen’s Heartbeat deck at GenCon because aggro was on the decline and Hoaen’s deck was more resilient against anti-Gifts decks.)
Week 6, Part I (Rich Hoaen’s Heartbeat deck)
Finished with a 1-2 record. Lost to two Kodama’s Reach-hating decks. Observed that the metagame was saturated with anti-Gifts sharks and switched to White Weenie in order to beat them.
Week 6, Part II (White Weenie)
Finished with a 6-1-2 record. Lost only in the finals to Jerret’s Godo deck.
If you look at the trend of my success and failure across the season, you’ll notice how at the very beginning I did very well with Rob.dec when White Weenie was big, then started doing less and less well as Gifts became the dominant deck and people started hating on it. I picked up several match losses to Sink into Takenuma and Hinder, and another to Time Stop, before deciding to “hate on the hate” and switch to White Weenie itself.
After peaking at 1921 near the beginning of the season, my Constructed rating fell all the way to 1778 by the time the second GenCon PTQ hit and I finally figured out it was time to switch decks. Over the course of those tournaments my playskill and the build of my deck fluctuated very little; the difference between my success at the beginning and end of the season compared to the slump in the middle had everything to do with how well I judged the metagame.
Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of conflicting advice on the topic of switching decks. One of the most common pieces of advice I’ve heard is to just “play what you’re comfortable with,” since that will minimize your play errors. After this season, I can’t say I agree with this — or at least not on the PTQ level. Outplaying your opponent is just one way to improve your match win percentage, and it seems to me that playing the correct deck gives you a much bigger win percentage boost overall, for much less effort.
Granted, there are other factors at work here — you might not be playing purely in order to qualify (and thus might prefer to stick with a deck you like regardless of what everyone else is playing), or you might know for a fact that you will lose more games due to inexperience with a more complicated deck than you would by sticking with a deck you know better…but the details of all this are better suited for a later article.
Until next time, it’s been a good run. Thanks for listening!
Team Check Minus