I set off for Pro Tour: San Diego with a few goals in mind. Mostly I was looking forward to seeing some great friends and having the opportunity to actually judge some Magic. In my role here at Star City Games, you will routinely find me on the stage involved in running the tournament rather than out on the floor fielding rulings. It’s fun not to be the one in charge for a while. One of the goals that was in the back of my mind was that the Pro Tour would offer a spectacular amount of information for one of my spreadsheets, if I could convince someone that it would be alright to give me access to the data that I needed. Lucky for me, there are some wonderful people in front of and behind the scenes at the Pro Tour who not only allowed me access, but invited me to put together a rough version to pull stats for the Top 8 coverage. Special thanks go out to Greg Collins, Bill Stark, Scott Larabee, Rich Hagon, and the rest of the coverage team for their help making this article happen.
As always, there are a few updates to the spreadsheet layout. There is a new “Sub-Archetype” field that solves the problem of having to search up different variants as different decks. There are also changes to accommodate a Pro Tour and its multiple formats: the Swiss Standings sheet doesn’t tell the whole story, so I added a sheet for Standard point totals. This also complicated which players to include in the top player match-up sheets, so I included both all Day 2 players and only players with 15 or more points in Standard. What? Read the name of the article again. As for deck lists, I have included the Top 8 players as well as any player who posted an 8-2 record or better in the Standard portion of the event.
No rogue deck this week, as Wizards did a great job covering the field, and I included extra lists in the spreadsheet. I suggest looking over Jeffrey Chen’s Vampires list. He posted a 9-1 record in the Standard portion of the event and it looks like the result from the StarCityGames.com Open in Dallas wasn’t a fluke, especially as Jeffrey peppers in some spice from Worldwake.
Some observations from playing around with the sheets:
Apparently, the Pros think that Jund is still the best deck, with better than a quarter of the field choosing the format killer as their weapon. One in five Jund players left the Putrid Leeches home, but that was the wrong choice, as the win percentage with no Leech was 7.4% lower (45.21% versus 52.61%) than with the blood sucker. Another interesting tidbit was that Jund’s win percentage creeps up from All Results (51.15%) to Day 2 versus Day 2 (51.79%) to 15+ vs. 15+ (52.04%) suggesting that the deck may not be as easy to pilot as some have suggested.
The breakout deck of the event was definitely Boss Naya (Zoo with Stoneforge Mystic). Luis Scott-Vargas grabbed the headlines, but it should not be overlooked that Tom Ross ran the same deck to a 9-1 Standard record and missed the Top 8 on tiebreakers. All over the tournament, the deck was in capable hands and posted very strong results with a 61.61% win percentage that, similar to Jund, kept creeping up. (62.50%, 62.79%) Speaking of Jund, how about a 40.74% record against the juggernaut? In this case, the top sheets actually show the impact of knowing the deck as the top players found a way to even the match-up (Day 2 — 50.00%) or tip it in their favor. (15+ – 56.25%)
I’ll stop doing your work for you. As always, I appreciate feedback in the forums!