I’d love to tell you that I made it back to the Junior Pro Tour because of my strength and determination. I’d chronicle trips to qualifiers, late hours spent playtesting and epic struggles. I could still tell you those stories, but I’d have to make them up. I actually requalified at an Arena qualifier. While there was a small field for the real qualifier, the one I played in was somewhat smaller. It had, let’s see, no, not that guy, not that guy either, he’s a little old, oh he counts, no, not him, so it comes out to… four. That’s right, four. Me, Jason Gordon and two random kids were competing for two slots.
When I tell you that we had it easier back then, believe me. I’m not making this stuff up.
That day it hit me what people would do to win. Jason and I were friends, and it was only that day that I asked the questions that led to my discovery of who he was. It was a Mirage Limited qualifier, and the preliminaries were not important because there was no one else. Back then, “no one else” didn’t mean no one else who could win a Tour. It meant no one else who could win a match. At any rate, it got to game three and I had the kill on the board for next turn. His only realistic out was Kaervek’s Torch, which would kill me. He had previously said he was in a hurry to get out of there, and we’d split the prizes in a two-slot qualifier. Ratings didn’t matter for Juniors, so the match literally didn’t make any difference.
I asked if he had it. He said yes. I picked up my cards. Once I’d done that, he showed he didn’t have it. Well, sure, of course I was being silly, but in a match that literally didn’t matter. In fact, since we split evenly, it’s easy to argue that the winner loses because he has to pay cash and Jason did in fact pay up a few minutes later. I consider that the cheapest lesson I would ever get. It cost me exactly nothing, and I learned something very important about Jason and about the game in general.
Either way, I was headed to Los Angeles to “the boat,” also known as the Queen Mary. This time I wasn’t going to mess around. This time I would be ready. The format was Rochester Draft, and Neutral Ground’s Pros were all working together to prepare. Under the leadership of Steve OMS (again!) and Sean Fleishman, who was the finalist in Columbus, we would draft, we would discuss and we would analyze. I did well in those practice sessions, so I felt confident going in that I had a good chance, as I was no longer operating under a disadvantage. There was no precedent for this strange new form of draft, so all of us would be on a level playing field. More than anything else we were learning what made a good Limited deck in the Mirage/Visions format, since no one had a clue about Rochester.
If you think I’m blowing this out of proportion, allow me to list some things we did not do. We didn’t learn to see how many decks were drafting each color. We didn’t even learn the importance of watching the players next to us and making sure not to fight them! Don’t even get me started about signaling. The drafts where you would try to figure out where everything was going to cascade and manipulate the entire draft to your advantage were years in the future. At this time I was able to draft a deck in isolation, treating the draft very much like a booster draft in a different order, and that put me several steps ahead of my Junior competition. One big question was what to do with a Torch when you opened one and were not Red; the general consensus was that you generally were forced to take it. Torch was just that good.
The key to understanding those days of Magic, especially in the Junior division, is to think of the Mendoza line. Magic has always had an equivalent of that line. Above that line, players understand the basics of how to attack and block, try and assemble decks that do something and in general play a competent game of Magic. Above that line you are a challenge, because even if you don’t find the subtle plays, make big innovations or play mistake-free Magic you’re not about to sit there and take it. You’re going to try and win. Below the line, players start chump blocking on turn 3. They attack for no reason. They decline to attack for no reason. They put cards in their decks that do little or nothing. They have mana bases that don’t work. In general they only win when they are handed the win on a silver platter. In a modern tournament, you need to be knocked out of Top 8 contention to have a good shot at finding a player below the line. Back then, the few players that were above it could dominate. When I got to LA, I found that most of the Juniors were even worse than I had suspected.
My first draft began and I quickly picked up a Maro and several other solid foundation cards for a G/U deck. While I didn’t have the best read on the table, I consistently saw neighbors take the wrong cards in my colors and give me the ones I wanted. I got counters, I got bounce and I got good, solid fat creatures with a decent curve. It wasn’t a bombed out machine, but it was enough to get the job done. I quickly pulled out to a 4-0 record, meaning that I would need only to go 2-1 at the second draft to make it into the Top 8. There was a big jump between the first draft and the second one, as all eight of us had swept our first draft, but it still felt easy. This time the cards forced me to go tri-color in order to get a good mix of cards, which is what happens when no one reads signals even with the cards face up, and I ended up W/R/U. The shortage of good cards helps too.
I got a feature match in round five, although neither of us has any idea why. We’ve never won or accomplished anything, but here we are in the center of the tournament as the Junior feature match. At one point he has twenty points of burn in his hand while we sit there waiting for something to do, but I’m at 22 so thanks to my brilliant refusal to not gain life I sneak out that game and go on to win the match. That puts me at 5-0 where I face…
Elijah Pollack. Damn. If I were making this up I’d feel like such a hack.
The match came down to Hakim, Loreweaver advantage. I kid you not. In the crucial game, he used a bounce spell to return my Hakim to my hand and played his own. I couldn’t remove it, stranding my copy in my hand thanks to the old Legend rule. It went on to kill me, and my nemesis had won again. That meant it would all come down to the last round, or at least I thought it would. Win and I was in, lose and I was out. Well, as it turned out I would have been seeded seventh, but that was because everything would have broken right including a complete lack of totally safe (given everyone else’s actions) intentional draws. My opponent had a fast Black/Red deck with cards like Sewer Rats, so even though I knew I was better and had a better deck, it was possible that I would lose. He didn’t get anything too blistering, and I hung on to win and enter the Top 8 as the second seed. That meant that my first round opponent would be the seventh seed, the top 6-2 who had gotten in after no one drew. And that would be…
Jason Gordon. It was time for him to go down.
When I entered my draft and looked forward to my quarterfinal, I had one goal: Defeat Jason Gordon. I wasn’t thinking about the second round because I didn’t care. If I defeated Jason, all would be right with the world win or lose. If I lost, I would have to go home and hang my head in shame. I wasn’t looking to my left. I wasn’t looking to my right. I was looking across the room, determined to find a way to beat him. I watched what he drafted, noting each and every card. He went Blue/White early on, getting a pair of Kukemassa Serpents as his primary attackers. I started out Black/White, but the White cards weren’t coming. I took a Power Sink and Memory Lapse, looking to go Blue, then when he got his second Serpent I decided that I could find another color. Things were confusing, but then I was offered the gift of gifts: Kaervek’s Torch. You don’t turn down the mighty Torch, not when you’re only committed to one color. I knew I had to play Black, but the rest was out in the open.
Meanwhile, I was drafting the same way some people play Team Limited when they’re working with people like Mike Long: Look straight ahead. That’s where the cards are, that’s where your opponent is. What’s going on to your left and right is not important. I can only imagine how much they wanted to pull their hair out, now that I’d taken cards in four of the five colors… or how bald they were going to be two packs later. You see, I was made an offer. They passed me Savage Twister.
That’s all five, folks. Sorry! At this point, I was seriously behind on cards but in exchange I had a reasonable Black base and two of the strongest cards in the format. Sure, I didn’t have any other Green or Red cards that were playable, but I had a whole pack of Visions and almost half of Mirage to draft my way out of that problem. Once you’re locked into a three-color deck, you have a lot of choices. I didn’t have any trouble getting my choice of playables and got a good mix of cards. The biggest problem was that I had to use a few cards that are (to be kind to them) on the edge of what I want in a deck, in particular Infernal Contract and Delirium. Both made sense in the context of my first match, so they got the nod and I figured later I would sideboard according to what I was facing, allowing me to choose among marginal cards.
As I looked at my deck, I knew I had some powerful tools but I worried about whether I could finish Jason off. His deck was so defensive, the Serpents and everything else I’ve since forgotten – I couldn’t think of anything good at attacking so it must have been great defensively. I thought I might have to use the Torch to kill him, so Delirium was in the deck to combine with that for twenty damage. I had two Dwarven Vigilantes, so I knew that the card would be at least decent for me otherwise. The deck had a lot of great synergies in it, and rewarded you for attacking and keeping the pressure on your opponent.
It turned out that Jason was not the problem. The moment we sat down it became clear that he was not happy with his deck. He couldn’t hide it. Then as the turns went by and his deck continued not to do anything I realized that the reason I couldn’t remember his offensive cards was not that he had a great defensive deck. The reason I couldn’t remember his great cards was that his draft had outright fizzled. Jason had nothing, and by the time I’d won 2-0 it was clear that I would have been the favorite to go 9-1. I was going on to the semi-finals, and as far as I was concerned the pressure was off. I was about to play on camera for a lot of scholarship money but somehow that didn’t register the way it should have. I think a lot of it was that I knew I didn’t have to worry about paying for college, because even if I didn’t get into Columbia and get the free ride that I would therefore be entitled to I still expected my parents to cover my tuition. No matter how much I won, it wouldn’t be “life changing” money. I think that helped me keep my focus where it needed to be. I was playing to win, not for money, and I played my best game.
They took me backstage after I won my quarterfinal match. Back then they were worried about players talking to the spectators between elimination rounds, presumably because we would get information we weren’t entitled to. Never mind that it was Rochester, which meant that in theory we knew everything there was to know. Either way, I was in the back with a mound of Hershey’s Kisses, the other competitors and reporter Jack Stanton. I talked a lot with Jack and Alan Comer. I also got reasonably hyped up on a lot of chocolate. Jack knew me from a side draft in Dallas, where we had met in the finals, and he seemed happy to learn that the friendly guy who had beaten him actually knew what he was doing. Considering how old I had been, the odds had been against it.
The semifinals looked like they would be the end as I fell behind 2-0 quickly. Things looked grim, but I sideboarded to better fight his deck and buckled in hoping my mana base wouldn’t desert me. In addition to my removal I now had two copies of Quirion Ranger so I could try and untap his Tar Pit Warriors. They were a key part of his offense, and if they didn’t hit me I felt I would have enough time that my bombs would carry the day. The crucial point came in game four when I attacked with a Dwarven Vigilante into a Wall of Corpses with two Tar Pit Warriors in play. If he had blocked, I’d have been in real trouble despite my sideboarding. Instead he didn’t realize what was about to happen, and I took down a 3/4. That let me stabilize and come back to win, at which point I went backstage again and Jack informed me how lucky I was to have won. I felt I’d earned it, but it’s always nice to get some help.
I was one match away, but my deck had met its match. Marks was playing a White/Black deck that had a lot of good flyers, ways to bring them back, plenty of ways to stop my attack and overall both a strong matchup against me and better cards overall. My last few slots especially were problematic. It was going to come down to an exhaustion war, with my deck attempting to break through and his attempting to stop me and then win with flyers. The longer things went the more trouble I was in unless I managed to pull something off with Savage Twister or the Torch. Of course, I didn’t know anything about his deck, so it took a few games before I knew how dire the situation was. I know that at least one of my two wins was stolen off him, and at least one was a case where I had to put myself on a long-term one outer (the Torch) and got it. It came down to game five, and I had to go first after winning game 4 to go with game 2.
Going first in Mirage block was terrible. For those of you who are planning to play Mirage Limited on Magic Online, let me give you that one piece of advice: Draw first. You won’t be sorry. In a way I was playing a tempo deck, and it just didn’t matter. Down a card, I looked at a one-land hand. Now I was down two cards, and he drew a set of cards that let him trade off with what I played. I could sit there and get killed by flyers or I could attack, trade my guys for his better guys and hope that he ran into a land clump or I drew a bunch of bombs in a row. Neither happened, and he won. It was a great match that I hope to watch on tape some day; I heard Hammer was hilarious on camera. Then I went backstage again to wait for the Seniors so I could be part of the awards ceremony. Tommi Hovi was playing David Mills, with Mills up two games to one.
What happened next was Magic history, and I missed it backstage. I heard about it later. It seems that David had fallen into the nasty habit of announcing his spells before tapping his lands. Back then this was against the rules, and he had been warned about this several times. Eventually the judges felt that they had no choice, and when he did it one time too many they disqualified him. Later they clarified that he would be disqualified with prize, so he would still finish second, but it was still a huge controversy. A player had been disqualified during the finals, and he wasn’t even cheating! At least, not right then! Well, at least not this particular way! I mean, he was on Tongo Nation. Draw your own conclusions. Mark Justice, another player who had not been cheating at that particular time, got up and made a speech about how this was a travesty of, well, you know. There was a near riot outside, and I sat there nonplused backstage. Us Juniors had managed to play out our matches without incident. What was the problem with these guys?
After the awards ceremony it hit me. I’d just won five thousand dollars in scholarship money. Take all that money I’d spent on cards, all the power I’d had stolen, all the entry fees and pay them back with interest. When Tony Parodi had said before that qualifier for Dallas that I would be a PT-level player if I qualified, I didn’t believe him. Suddenly I was in, and Paris was next up. I had finished in the top two, so I had a choice: I could keep my Junior slots, or I could give them up along with my future eligibility for one shot at the glory. I could go to Paris.
The Duelist Sideboard came out, and I had my own page in it. I was thrilled. The article about me was called “Going With the Flow,” to go with Marks’ entitled “Maybe I Can Win.” The idea was that I had finished second with a flexible draft strategy, changing colors based on what was passed to me and calling a full five audibles in the final draft before settling on B/R/g because of the Savage Twister and Kaervek’s Torch. Looking back, I’m amazed at how completely wrong I was about how to Rochester draft. It wasn’t about repeated iterations or anything like that. It was that my drafting strategy was a recipe for a giant train wreck, although I implemented it well. On the other hand, perhaps wrecking the rest of the table is an underestimated skill. It’s moot now, as Wizards has wisely restricted Rochester to its team format. [And perhaps not even then. – Knut, curious where the recent announcement of Team Constructed will leave Team Rochester after next year]
In the end, I did not go to Paris. This had nothing to do with not thinking I had a chance, because with such a wide open format I figured I had as good a shot as most players. It was not because I had no team, because I could easily have worked with the Neutral Ground crowd including Steve OMS and Jon Finkel. There was some hesitancy about going to Europe, but I could have dealt with that. What stopped me was the Putnam examination. For those who don’t know about it, which is probably most of you, this is a mathematics competition for Colleges. I was only a freshman at Columbia, where the college paid for the tuition and Magic had taken care of the dorm, but I had extensive experience back in High School and wanted it more than everyone else there combined. Based on our practice scores, I was chosen as the Columbia captain. I couldn’t get up and go to a silly Magic tournament and skip the Putnam. My parents wouldn’t have let me even think like that, and I didn’t want to. Even when I was the only one at the practice session with Professor Morgan, I was busy testing for a totally different format. I played in a Paris qualifier for fun and made Top 8, but I knew I was going to be in a classroom that weekend with something to prove. Actually about six things, since that is what the Putnam is.
We didn’t win. I don’t know if my old teammates from Stuyvesant ended up winning from their new base at Harvard or if it was someone else, but as with the USAMO I didn’t even do well enough to get my test back. Considering I was the captain, that was about all she wrote. Soon after that they canceled the Junior division, and gave all of us Senior slots to make up for the loss. Instead of going to Paris, I would be going back to The Boat. The format would be Tempest Constructed. Not TBC, just Tempest. Even after that, I would have three additional Pro Tours in which to make my mark. That next Pro Tour is now the only missing piece of the puzzle, as soon after that I would begin writing.
That’s how I made it to the Pro Tour. It all happened by accident. Every step of the way all I was doing was having fun playing the game I loved. When I happened to qualify, I figured I’d go and do my best. In the end I had earned several slots on Tour, and made the most of them. It was only later that I would work as much as I could. My writing career was even an accident, as I sent one of my team posts to Frank Kusamoto by hitting the Reply-All button on a team message that I hadn’t looked at too carefully. When he asked if he could post it, I said sure and when I built TurboZvi I knew who to send the write-up to. Frank put it on the front page and I was a writer.