This weekend marked the second Pro Tour of the season. Coming off a fourth place finish in San Diego, I had high hopes for San Juan. As I boarded my flight to Puerto Rico, I was reasonably certain that I would be playing Boros in the Constructed portion of the event. I had been smashing everyone on MTGO with it, and felt like it was among the best decks. I would later find out that the MTGO competition is rather soft and not the best way to prepare for the Pro Tour.
Kyle “Why did Gavin just call me Banana Bear?” Boggemes was among the crew in our beach house, as well as Conley “kidnapped twice” Woods, Kenny Mayer, Vidi Wijaya, Justin Larose, Jason Terry, Brett “Jason keeps calling me Butters” Piazza, Raine “Lost at Sea” Laurie, Alex “Ondu Giant” Smith, Christian “Creepy dude in the photo” Keeth, Ari Lax, Sean Pottenger, Mat Marr, Gavin Verhey, and Josh Speranza. Altogether there were fifteen or so people in a house intended for about six to eight. That’s pretty typical for a Magic trip.
Shortly after my arrival at the beach house we did a mock tournament where everyone in the house played either a stock metagame deck or their pet deck. I played my Boros deck and went 0-4. Later we played another mock tournament and I went 1-3, barely beating a Mono Red deck, which was supposed to be my best matchup. At this point I started to seriously consider changing decks last minute. Fortunately deck-builder extraordinaire Conley Woods was among the crew in our beach house, so my plan was to try and brew something up or to play whatever he plays.
Conley had been brewing all weekend and his most promising creation was a Green-White Eldrazi ramp deck. I was not satisfied with its consistency when I played it because, like all the other ramp decks in the format, too often I would draw too much mana and not enough action and other times not enough ramp and too much high-end clunk. I was not convinced ramp was the way to go for the tournament. I felt the main thing my Boros deck was lacking was an answer to mass removal spells like Day of Judgment and All is Dust. So I tried concocting a White-Blue Aggro deck that played cheap White creatures and splashed Blue for countermagic. I could not get the mana to work out right since the tapped lands slowed the deck down far too much. At this point Gavin Verhey was testing a Blue-Green ramp deck he found on MTGO and was having reasonable success with it. The deck was pretty loose at the time, but it felt like it had potential. Green could provide not only the pressure but also the smooth mana fixing to support countermagic that Blue-White could not. So I decided to work more closely with Blue-Green.
Gavin and Ari Lax had taken out Sphinx of Lost Truths and Oracle of Mul Daya from the original list and replaced them with Nest Invader, Nissa Revane, and Nissa’s Chosen. I played some games with the deck and was not happy with the Nissa package, nor was I happy with the manabase. I added Khalni Gardens to improve the Vampire matchup, since tokens provide protection against Gatekeeper of Malakir and Consuming Vapors, while also fueling Eldrazi Monument. I also added Island-walking River Boas over Nissa’s Chosen to improve the Blue-White matchup. The aggressive Red decks (Boros and Mono Red) were tough if they knew what they were doing, but if they let Lotus Cobra or Joraga Treespeaker survive for a turn, we could explode out with a Wolfbriar Elemental for 2 or 3 and take control of the game. Since the deck was rather rogue, I expected a lot of people to not know exactly how to play against it or what to expect from it, so I was happy where we were at and the three of us decided this was the deck to play. Here is the deck we ended up with:
Creatures (23)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (14)
Spells (19)
Sideboard
Meanwhile Conley did some last minute brewing and came up with a Blue-Red Chandra (Ablaze) Control deck with 4 main deck Lavaball Traps, siding into Rolling Terrains and Fissure Vents. Since all our Fissure Vents were proxied, he began busting packs trying to find them. I was on the fence whether to audible to his deck last minute, but after watching him play about a dozen games with the deck, it felt too inconsistent to me, so I stuck with the Blue-Green deck. He and Dave Williams played the Chandra deck and went a combined 1-8.
Gavin ended up giving our Blue-Green deck to Ben Hayes, and the four of us went a combined 20-10 with the deck, including a 10-0 record in the hands of Ben. Ari played against three Red decks and punted twice where he should have won, and I had some bad luck, missing land drops and having to mulligan to five in almost every match. If you read my GP: Houston report or my GP: DC report, you know I’m honest with myself when it comes to admitting my mistakes, but in this tournament I felt like I made a good deck choice and played well but just could not catch enough breaks to perform better than 4-4 overall. Basically what happened to my opponents all tournament in San Diego happened to me all tournament in San Juan. I mulliganed approximately three times as often as my opponents, and despite having relatively favorable pairings, I could not close things out. I would gladly take extremely good fortune in San Diego and extremely bad fortune in San Juan over average fortunate in both tournaments, since the prize payouts on the Pro Tour are very top heavy. I guess I was due for a bad tournament.
Patrick Chapin wrote an article yesterday where he discussed some of the best decks in the format or best decks for the tournament, and this deck certainly deserves mention as a candidate for best deck. It posted one of the two 10-0 records of the tournament, placed half of its pilots into Day 2, and barring some extremely bad luck and misplays, it would have had much better results. More than anything, though, this deck had a plan against everyone. We fairly accurately predicted the metagame, and the only main difference between our deck and the New York Mono Green deck was that we splashed for counters and bounce spells. In hindsight the bounce spells may not have been necessary, but the deck was a last minute creation that really only had a handful of people developing it. If there were more people focusing on perfecting the deck, we probably would have had more Eldrazi Monuments, more creatures, and probably no bounce — splashing Blue solely for countermgic. The deck was fine, but probably could have been better with a little bit more tuning. So that was how Block Constructed went down.
I would talk more about the Block Constructed format, but it is not relevant to anyone except MTGO grinders since it will not be an upcoming PTQ or Grand Prix format. Its primary importance, I think, is showing what the Standard format will look like once Shards block rotates out. Granted, M11 will be out, along with the next standalone set, but just like Pro Tour: Honolulu gave us Jund, Naya, and Cascade Control decks, San Juan gave us a number of templates from which to build new archetypes post-rotation. If the Pro Tour is any indication of what is to come, expect Forests to see a lot of play. It is unfortunate that all the work that was put into Block Constructed is only relevant for one tournament, but that’s just the way it is.
Since 4-4 was not good enough to make Day Two, I had to find other ways to spend my time in San Juan. I knew my Standard Polymorph deck needed work after the Grand Prix, but I had been focusing entirely on Block and hence did not make the necessary changes. So I skipped the Saturday PTQ and instead just played in 3v3 drafts for the rest of the weekend. In one match against Sam Black I cast turn 3 Rage Nimbus and then proceeded to attack with it as a 7/5 flyer thanks to Warmonger’s Chariot to quickly end the game. In that same draft, Matt Nass went infinite against Sam with Echo Mage, Reality Spasm, and Spawning Breath. Rough beats.
Saturday night, half the people in our house went out to a dinner where Alex’s fiancé Isabel and Conley had a whipped cream and water fight, Christian played the role of ‘creepy dude’ in a passerby’s photo, Sean and Raine out-drank everyone, and Alex told us about the time when he drew 7 extra cards at a PTQ. Since the other car took the GPS device, we had to navigate back to the house on our own. We ended up taking the scenic route past Masnervate Road where there were multiple attractive Puerto Rican women adorned in fishnet stockings, high heels, and low cut skirts. They must have been hitchhiking, because they were standing on the street corners and getting into vehicles whenever someone would pull over for them. Unfortunately, we did not have any extra room in our car, so we could not stop and offer any such rides.
On Sunday, the Pro Tour Top 8 played prelude to the main event of the weekend: the World Series of Puerto Rico, headed by Gerard Fabiano and Osyp Lebedowicz. It is a sort of hybrid competition somewhere between American Idol and Musical Chairs, except instead of singing or trying to find an open chair, you just scream “Puerto Rico!” as loudly as you can whenever the music stops if Osyp points at you. Most people did rather well, except for Paul Reitzl and Rich Hagon, neither of whom seemed to understand what was going on when Osyp pointed at them and everyone was gazing at them anxiously waiting for them to shout Puerto Rico. Some ridicule the game as obnoxious or even childish. One DCI judge, when pointed at, even gave the “No sir” when he clearly knew what was expected of him. Such critics fail to understand the complexity and ingenuity necessary to excel at such competition. I for one endorse this game, and look forward to whatever incarnation of it springs up in Amsterdam.
On the last night of the trip, the beach house Internet was down, the tournament site was closed, and it was raining outside. So we resorted to playing pack war — the most skill intensive Magic format ever invented. Kenny Mayer tried twice and could not defeat me, and when Conley returned he tried his hand at it, but this time we added a twist. Each player starts the game by anteing a quarter, and then during your draw step you have to ante an additional quarter or you skip your draw step. The winner of the game wins all the cards from both packs as well as all the quarters that were anted during the game. After collectively busting nearly an entire box, Conley finished ahead by about five dollars in quarters, but I ended up with the Gideon Jura.
All in all, despite not doing well in the main event, the weekend was a lot of fun. Although the EV on those WPN tournaments is pretty terrible, I can definitely see why so many people made the trip. The Pro Tour experience really is unmatched by any other Magic tournament, and even if you are not qualified for the main event, the WPN provides enough of an excuse to attend. Anyone interested in playing Magic competitively should at least attend one Pro Tour during their career, whether they are qualified for it or not. The most enjoyable weekends of the year for me are always Pro Tour weekends, even if the actual tournament goes badly. San Juan was no exception.