Grand Prix: Chicago will be much more than just a really big Legacy tournament. Grand Prix tourneys stretch over two days and have events on the third; players can earn byes. There is a cut to Day 2, which is run at Professional Rules Enforcement level. And they are big! Grand Prix: Los Angeles had 834 players show up to play 9 rounds on Saturday and another 6 on Sunday. This article is mostly intended for the player that is new to the Grand Prix scene. If you’ve only ever played in a handful of Legacy events, and maybe you attended GP: Philadelphia or GP: Columbus, I hope you can get a lot out of this article. For those with a little more experience, I’ve been talking to players who have performed well at the higher levels to get some tips to pass along.
Byes were originally instituted at the Grand Prix level to make it reasonable for international players to compete. At some of the larger events, players might need to win seven out of nine rounds in order to make Day 2 and pick up any prize for their troubles. If all of a sudden these players only need to win four rounds instead, it becomes a more attractive option to travel. Thus, byes. If you can reasonably get byes, you want to. Byes do some pretty incredible things, not the least of which is give you free wins.
At a Grand Prix, players can earn anywhere from one to three awarded byes which give you free match wins at the beginning of the tournament. In other words, if you have two byes, you start the tournament during round 3 with six match points already. Also having byes significantly helps your tiebreakers, which can help you make the cut to Day 2. If you enter the tournament with no byes, your opponents in the first few rounds will have losses. They may even continue to lose throughout the day. The first tiebreaker used by the DCI Reporter is Opponent Match Win Percentage; if you beat your round one opponent, going into round two you will have 0 for OMW. If you have a bye in a round, your tiebreakers are not affected. Consequently you do not have opponents who have lost in the early rounds dragging you down. As the day goes on if you continue to win you will play against progressively better players; beating them will improve your tiebreakers. Your tiebreakers determine where you stand at the end of day one and at the end of the tournament; having byes could mean the difference between getting money at top 64 and missing out at 65th.
Byes also help you because they let you spend time not playing Magic. I know it sounds weird to say that, but believe me: by the end of a Grand Prix you will have the opportunity to play all the Magic you could possibly want and a few extra late night drafts on top. (And I checked out the side events at GP: Chicago; they look pretty awesome.) But not playing in the first few rounds gives you some time to relax, check out the dealers (StarCityGames will be at Chicago) and the artists and your friends. Grand Prix Day 1s are long and can be very high pressure, especially during the final rounds. Getting the opportunity to skip a few of these rounds can prevent losing a critical game in the final rounds due to fatigue.
Want to earn byes? Check your DCI Eternal, Constructed and Total ratings. The full information on byes is here. If your Constructed or Eternal rating is at or over 2000, or your Total rating is over 2050, you have earned three byes. If you have lower ratings than that but still over 1800 or 1850 Total, you have earned some byes. One of the things to think about is how possible it is in the next month to get up to three byes with rating and whether it is worth the risk to you to keep playing sanctioned Magic. If you are right by the cutoff you may want to avoid a sanctioned tournament to prevent your rating from dropping too far if you have a bad tournament. If you have some byes on rating but not the full amount, you have to perform a different set of risk/reward calculations: is it worth the risk of losing byes in order to win more.
Unless you are already sitting on a monster rating, the easiest way to earn the full three byes is winning a Grand Prix Trial. That GP information page I linked above will soon have a schedule for a few Grand Prix Trials in the month before the tournament. But maybe you get to the tournament without three byes; you still have an opportunity to win byes. All day Friday (starting at noon) at the tournament site will be devoted to last minute Grand Prix Trials: 32-person single elimination Legacy events with the winner receiving three byes at the Grand Prix. If you win and you have less than three byes, you have the full three. Sorry, they don’t stack. It is definitely worth playing in these, or at least watching the field; you can often get an idea of the decks that people are planning to bring and especially the decks that are doing well. For this reason there can be incentives to not bringing out the deck you intend to play at the Grand Prix in order to catch people unawares; if you are playing Ichorid on Saturday you may not want to remind everyone the day before that the deck exists and to pack hate. But maybe you show up and the Trials are full of people playing the Progenitus deck; now you can get tournament experience with the deck and find out how your deck does against it. Maybe somebody came up with a variant on the strategy you never thought of. And if you hurry, you may be able to play that deck in the tournament and have some success. This strategy has certainly happened before.
Maybe you lose in the Trial. That’s not a problem; there will be Trials running until the site closes. The interesting thing about Trials is that they cannot deprive you of byes for trying. Byes based on rating are locked in on the Wednesday before the Grand Prix (March 4). You could lose in twenty grinders in a row and still not lose whatever byes you earned on rating; you may just regret the rating loss the next week. You can even play in last minute Trials even if you have three byes. Because these events are purely single-elimination, you are even eligible to arrange a prize split and drop before the final round. So a lot of players that already have three byes will enter a Trial, win four rounds and drop in exchange for prize. They get to play, scout the field and win something for their time.
The beginning rounds of the tournament are a great opportunity for scouting. One of the most important things you can do before a Grand Prix starts and in the early rounds is scouting and networking. If you talk to enough people you can get an idea of the trends going on. While it would be impossible for most people to match all 600-800 players in the room, it is certainly possible to put teams onto their team deck. It can be useful just to figure out which teams are playing which decks. At Grand Prix: Los Angeles if you see Brian Demars playing the Faeries Gifts deck in the early rounds, maybe you can figure out that Patrick Chapin is playing the same deck when you face him in round 4. Pre-tournament scouting is just as important, if not more. A lot of players are willing to talk about the decks that they brought or at least what they think the turnout for the tournament will be. I know a handful of players who found out that TEPS was going to be the breakout deck at Los Angeles, and only did not play the deck because they literally could not get enough copies of it together. Maybe you get to the tournament site and find out that dealers are sold out of Natural Orders and Progenituses. You talk to a few players and find out that people are taking the Natural Order / Progenitus deck more seriously than you are. If you do all this legwork the day before the tournament rather than halfway through Day 1, you will have enough time to put some Wash Out or Perish into your sideboard. That could easily be the difference between going 3-3 on Day 1 and going 7-2 and making Day 2.
Deck selection for a Grand Prix is one of the most important factors at a tournament. If you have the right deck, that can sometimes be more important than being a good player. If you don’t believe me, re-read Tom LaPille GP: Charlotte Top 8 report. He talks about how he made more than a few play mistakes and still easily Top 8ed. Grand Prix tournaments are large and they tend to feature a diverse set of strategies and decks; this is doubly true at an event like this, where many people will probably try porting strategies from other formats or resurrecting old decks. If you start to include specific hate cards against a bunch of specific decks, you will run into problems. A better way to handle sideboarding is by dividing the format up into different strategies and trying to include flexible cards that cover the strategy. At a local tournament you may be able to devote different hate cards, for example, to White Weenie and Goblins decks, but at the GP you may need to lump all the beatdown decks into one category. You want to be prepared for, at a minimum, combo, Counterbalance, Loam, Landstill, graveyard based strategies, tribal decks, pure beatdown decks, and you probably also want to give some thought to strategies like Survival, Stax, and Burn. That’s far too much even if you do not distinguish between similar decks like Threshold and Dreadtill which you might attack with a different set of hate cards. It is possible that someone may pull something completely unexpected at this event; some version of Elves may turn out to be broken, or the Natural Order deck could be awesome. Broad cards like Perish, Krosan Grip, and Control Magic are often much more attractive than more narrow cards like Mind Harness at a large event. After all you cannot count on playing against only established decks.
Okay, that’s not exactly true. When you enter the tournament (whether you have byes or not) can do a lot to determine the types of decks you play. A deck like UGR Thrash might be a great choice if you expect the field to all play Counterbalance-Top decks. It’s not a great choice if you play somewhere like GenCon because many of the decks are less vulnerable to Stifle and Wasteland. If you have no byes, that sort of deck is probably a really bad choice for the Grand Prix. If you have three byes you may be able to dodge your bad matchups and just face the decks you want to face.
If you want to really do well at a Grand Prix, the first step is figuring out how to make Day 2. This means going at least X-2 or making Top 64 (or Top 128 if there are 800 or more players registered). Because Los Angeles was just over the cut-off at 834, some players made the cut even at 6-3. To be guaranteed to make it to Day 2, you need to make at least X-2. One of the implications of this is that you can afford to lose two matches and still have a shot of making the money or possibly even Top 8. Maybe you tune UW Landstill until it beats every deck but Ichorid and combo; you can probably afford to eat a loss to Ichorid if you think it will be underplayed. If you devote enough sideboard slots to combo to make that matchup favorable, as long as you mostly dodge Ichorid, you will be fine. The requirement here is that Ichorid has to be underplayed; it would be silly to try and dodge all the decks with access to Counterbalance. I think the three most popular decks will be Goblins at #1 and Dreadtill and Ad Nauseam at some order of two and three. Even if I’m wrong, almost everyone seems to agree that one form of Counterbalance or another will be one of the most popular strategies at the Grand Prix. Consequently, you need some sort of answer. The best way to pick your deck would probably be to figure out what decks or strategies you think will be the most popular, find a deck that beats those, and set up your sideboard to beat a wide range of strategies you expect. If I were to go and play, I would aim in this order: Counterbalance-Goyf, Goblins, Tendrils, pure Landstill, Loam, and then start looking at the tertiary decks.
Time has the potential to be a factor, both in the round and outside it. Day 1 is going to drag on and on, even if you have byes it will still be hours of Magic. You probably do not want to play a deck that might go to time every round. While I love the Scepter-Landstill deck I posted last month, after taking it to a few tournaments I have decided that it is not a deck I would want to play in the Grand Prix. When I played that deck the rounds were looking closer and closer like 55 or 60 minute rounds; I would not want to do that twelve to fifteen times in a weekend. The ability to finish your rounds early so you can get up and get some food provides a huge advantage. And while you do get some match points for a draw, your ability to make day 2 is predicated on getting enough wins. You want to play a deck that you can play at a fast enough speed that you’re not in danger of drawing. And then you need to be ready to call judges to watch for Slow Play in case your opponent is not as practiced as you are.
Grand Prix are long events; they last all day for two days straight plus Trials on the Friday. Everything that anyone ever said about taking care of yourself physically at a tournament is true with interest at a Grand Prix. You have to make sure you get enough food and water during the day such that you can still mentally function at ten in the evening as well as you could have at noon, and you might be dealing with jet lag. Show up Friday and play in the trials; get used to the new timezone and playing at a more competitive level of play when the stakes are lower. Get plenty of sleep Friday AND Saturday night; the forums are littered with stories of people that spent too much time drinking or cubing and lost quickly the next day.
Day 1 of a Grand Prix is run at a Competitive rules enforcement level, and Day 2 is run at Professional rules enforcement level. Even if you have experience with other tournaments at the Competitive Rules Enforcement Level, there is likely to be more strict play at the Grand Prix. Some of this is intentional and good; there is going to be a crack staff of excellent judges at the event who know how to enforce things that are very hard to rule on, like Slow Play. Part of this is unintended; when there is a lot on the line, many players will do whatever it takes to win. There are more attempts to play on the edge, rules cheese and fish for penalties. The DCI is doing what it can to remove the incentive for these behaviors; fishing for penalties is more likely to earn you an Unsportsmanlike Conduct than get the desired result. But the takebacks that you may be used to at local events are more likely to be denied. At the Grand Prix you want to be more explicit and rely less on shortcuts. If you rush and skip steps in animating Mishra’s Factory before declaring it as a blocker on Day 1 it will be allowed, assuming there was no potential to gain advantage by doing things out of order. Out of Order Sequencing is not allowed on Day 2; at a Professional level event there is an expectation that players know the way the rules work. So don’t take the risk; play both days very precisely.
A few suggestions on this front: confirm life totals after every change. It seems pedantic and obnoxious, but I’ve seen more problems in tournaments due to an ongoing discrepancy with life totals than anything else. It is easy to do and has the potential to avoid losing a game you were winning. Know the combat steps: you want to animate your attackers in the Beginning of Combat step and you want to animate your blockers in the Declare Attackers step. Make sure it is clear when you are casting spells on someone’s end of turn and on your own or their upkeep. And absolutely get new sleeves for the tournament and check them after every round. And double check your decklist. For more along these lines, check out Riki’s article archives and this article I wrote.
I wrote earlier that time is an issue and I’ve mentioned the need to avoid Slow Play concerns. Almost always if you find yourself taking too long to play a game, you have not practiced with the deck enough. You really should lock in your deck in the next week or two and spend the rest of the time crafting a sideboard. Part of the reason you want to scout is that you can tune your sideboard or sideboarding plans. There should not be a deck that you have not at least considered how to sideboard against them. After you have that, you may want to examine the mechanics of how you play. Tom LaPille wrote an article, seemingly lost to the aether now, about the mechanics of playing faster. For example, when you activate Sensei’s Divining Top, do you pick up the cards one at a time or do you grab all three at once? Do you untap all your lands at once or one at a time? In order to do well, you need to have a good deck you know how to play well, and then actually get everything lined up so you can play well.
Thanks a lot to Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, Max McCall and Zack Smith for helping contribute some of the tips that went into this article.
I hope to see you all there! For the record, I will be wearing stripes as well.
Kevin Binswanger
Anusien
[email protected]