If there was anything different about Pro Tour Khans of Tarkir for me than previous Pro Tours, it was in the details. If anything, it was closer to how
I’ve felt at Grand Prix than Pro Tours in the past.
I knew the answers to things I thought about, things that once felt obscure. They have a certain amount of mana up? They have X, Y, or Z to play around.
Their curve so far indicates their hand is curving up to Elspeth, so I shouldn’t extend my second Siege Rhino as if they don’t have it they lose anyways,
and I don’t want to lose both.
This wasn’t all an accident. Some of it was the luck of the Constructed format being fairly clear, us predicting everything well, and Limited being fairly
trick light, but I worked on things before this event that I hadn’t before and it paid off.
These are the items I’ve been able to identify focusing on that helped me know answers and recognize patterns in advance so that when I sat down to play my
matches everything fell into line. In the past, these are things that have been lost in the mayhem of testing and deck selection. I made a decision this
time that they wouldn’t be.
What is Your Default Action
One of the first questions I had for Steve Rubin when I decided to play his Abzan deck was, “What is the typical thing you do with each planeswalker?”
Especially in this deck, you have a ton of very decision intensive cards. Every planeswalker has two decisions when it enters play, some of which lead to
chains of other decisions. Where do my Ajani, Mentor of Heroes counters go to maximize my blocks? What am I tutoring for with Liliana Vess? If I +1 Sorin,
Solemn Visitor, what happens with my attacks? What the heck am I even doing with this Abzan Charm?
If you can’t weigh these options to make decisions, it starts getting bad fast. You spend a bunch of time on decisions that you should know the answer to
already, then are rushed to make decisions that are game-unique, and all in all, make less correct decisions and lose. The less actual decisions you have
to make, the easier the game gets and the more you can worry about the decisions that do come up. If you don’t believe me on this, believe Pat Chapin.
Making only the decisions that matters is great.
Common decisions of this kind are (using my Pro Tour Khans of Tarkir Abzan deck as a framework):
-Do you play a one drop or tapped land on turn 1? In my deck, the answer was usually tapped land because Thoughtseize doesn’t have to take a card on turn 1
and gets to see the top card of their deck if you wait, while Elvish Mystic ramping into turn 2 Courser of Kruphix only matters on the absolute best curves
that are rare with a tapped land also in hand. This applies to playing on or off curve on other turns to set up later plays and is most affected by what
play your opponent can make on their turn that you may need to get ahead of.
-What drop do you play on a given turn? This is often matchup dependent, but you can play Courser of Kruphix pre-land drop if you want to maximize your
chances of a fifth and sixth land or just have more cards, Sorin, Solemn Visitor if you want to stretch their spot removal or Nullify or sweepers, and
Siege Rhino if you just want to bash them.
-What planeswalker ability do you use? Ajani, Mentor of Heroes usually Communes over Reap what is Sown unless you have immediate need for the extra power
or toughness to protect it or race a combo, Liliana Vess tutors unless you know the +1 is keeping it alive or taking a relevant card, Sorin makes a Vampire
unless the extra damage or life immediately matters, and Elspeth, Sun’s Champion makes tokens unless it is Plague Winding or killing a must kill threat. As
for Nissa, Worldwaker, I was unaware that card actually had more than one ability.
-How valuable is your removal? Turns out the Abzan deck has a ton and can typically spew it off whenever it isn’t terrible tempo, but other decks have to
reserve their good answers for specific cards.
-Do you attack or hold back? This is where I feel like I made the best decisions with the deck and where a lot of other people got into trouble. You can’t
race a Rhino. The only times you don’t push pretty hard are when you are clearly gaining a huge advantage every turn, and there is nothing they can do to
stop it. If you have Elspeth, Sun’s Champion and they have no way to stop it or burn you out, you can block until you one shot them. Otherwise you probably
are killing them in some way, shape, or form unless doing so makes you die.
-Other card specific things. The card in this deck was Abzan Charm, which was basically kill a thing if there was a thing to kill, draw cards if you had
another kill spell and end of turn mana, or add counters if it is the world’s biggest blowout. There is also Thoughtseize,
but there really isn’t a point in talking about that when this exists.
By the way, if there’s anything I’ve learned about that card, it’s that creating a hole is actually the biggest thing it does. If they have multiples of a
card and you aren’t going to fight them to exhaust that resource (i.e. kill all their threats, slip a threat through removal) nine out of ten times it’s
better to fight them somewhere else. This is why the best anti-Thoughtseize hands are two of piece A, two of piece B, and some lands.
On the fortunate side, a lot of these decision-intensive cards in the current Standard are really powerful, as are a lot of the other ones. So sometimes if
you make smaller mistakes it just doesn’t matter. For example, you miss a scry trigger because you are just thinking you will fetch the card away, you miss
an opposing Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and take two damage, you accidentally board in a blank and draw it, or you literally just make terrible decisions and
don’t play your spell for three or four turns.
Doesn’t matter, Siege Rhino has your back.
The Matchup Specifics
In the G/R Monsters versus Abzan matchup, specific to my list, you have to save all of your removal that kills Stormbreath Dragon for Stormbreath Dragon
game 1. That means don’t play Elspeth, Sun’s Champion unless you have a Hero’s Downfall in hand to kill the Dragon, as the card is actually 4WW Smite the
Monstrous that can kill protection from white creatures. Obvious exceptions exist for being dead or beating a Dragon on the spot, but that’s less common
than thinking you are ahead and just losing to a 7/7 unblockable unkillable.
In the U/B Control matchup, you want to just Abzan Charm on three over playing Courser of Kruphix. One of these draws you cards, the other doesn’t draw you
cards if you play it after playing a land and just trades for removal. You win by running them out of things.
There are going to be corner cases where the default decision is not correct. If you can sense ahead of time that this might be true somewhere, try it out.
If it feels like you are losing doing what you would normally do, try something else.
Obviously in a huge event someone is going to throw something random against you, and decisions will have to be made on the fly about whether your default
plan is right. But there are things you will know about in advance that you can plan and test for. Once you have narrowed down your options, this is the
direction to start looking, especially for non-Pro Tour events where your enemy is much more known.
Sideboarding
I feel really, really dumb for not caring about this for a lot of last year. I had too many last minute, wing it sideboards that were untested and
uncounted.
This is something I’ve harped on since… not day one, but definitely my second year on the Pro Tour. I almost feel like I’ve said it too many times, but
as I apparently keep forgetting I’ll say it again. I’ll again reference the Jund decks from Pro Tour San Diego, in part because they are so close in
execution to the Abzan deck I played and in part because they are so close to flawless and lead to my Jund list at Grand Prix DC that Brad Nelson won,
which is probably the most cohesive 75 I’ve ever played.
This was the first Pro Tour in a while where I felt the same way about my deck.
Sometimes you don’t really need or want a sideboard beyond the obvious powerful cards. Mono-Red at this Pro Tour felt that way, where there just weren’t 15
cards in the format that you were super excited to play. Same with Jeskai Ascendancy or all-in combo decks in general. You can’t really cut cards, so most
of the time you are sideboarding two cards or all 15.
But if you ever are doing anything fair, make sure you have plans. And that the numbers line up. And that the plans actually matter after board.
Operations
You hear a lot of things on this front.
Sleep before the event.
Drink lots of water.
Eat healthy.
Lose weight.
Don’t drink alcohol before you go to bed.
Don’t audible the night before the event.
Don’t play decks that are outside your range.
Listen, a lot of these good things are guidelines.
If anything, this is the biggest thing I’ve worked on in the last year.
The precipitating events for this were pair of Grand Prix where I simply stopped functioning mid-day. I think it was specificallyGrand Prix Detroit (Modern that Josh Mcclain won) and Grand Prix DC (Legacy that Owen won). To be fair,
part of the reason for this was some crazy work hours making me wake up multiple hours earlier than I was used to, but I wanted to standardize my procedure
to minimize these things.
So I started working on it.
And what I figured out in a year of work?
There’s exactly one rule that matters:
Figure out what works for you. It won’t work for everyone else. To quote Conley Woods, a guy who has seen his fair share of setups, “Everyone thinks they
have the secret sauce. They are all probably right exactly for themselves in the exact scenario they are in now.”
The same way you use events to playtest, use them to figure out how you can maximize your readiness, alertness, and comfort at future events.
Hypothesize. Test. Repeat. Really, it’s no different from testing a format.
I start testing as soon as possible for specific amounts of time each week. I make sure I’m asleep at specific times. I make sure sleeping arrangements
work out in specific ways. I make sure I eat certain amounts at certain times. I drink X amount of water, Y amount of caffeinated beverages as evidenced by
the double queue of Diet Mountain Dew and water every time I was on camera. I make sure I select a deck a certain amount of time before the event and avoid
the madness of last second decisions. I make sure I arrive on site a certain amount of time early for each time zone to adjust.
Is all of this necessary? Probably not? Just a couple of those things were good enough to get me quite a ways.
But it all makes it easier.
It’s possible I’m pushing it too far, making it a robotic exercise, but I want to win. As much as I’m all fun and games once the matches start, I’m all
focus and business up front.
This isn’t all there is to be done, and I know I have flaws to fix still. I’m far from the best technical player in the world, as evidenced by that laundry
list of mistakes I made in the top 8. Listening to Chris Fennell on Draft is good, but it only gets you so far as there are usually minor details you have
to figure out on your own. And sometimes he can’t make it to the Pro Tour until the day before and you can’t just railbird three of his drafts.
But if I keep repeating what I did right here, maybe I can focus on the other details in the future.
Actually, if anything, that’s what I’ve really taken away from the Pro Tour over the years. There’s a lot of things that don’t really take work to do, but
a few that do. And for those things, it’s a matter of just working through the details until things start falling into place.