Hello again!

In last 14 days I played two team tournaments. 【GP Rotterdam】 and 【World Magic Cup】. We did not do well. We went 10-4 at GP Rotterdam, which is good enough for 1 Pro Point, but with only 6 results counting, it will probably not even count at the end of the year (especially if you have, like me, 2 other 1 point finishes). At WMC we lost our elimination round for Top 32 in Day 2, so we did not make any money or extra Pro Points. Both tournamnets were bit of a dissapointment for me, especially because one more win in either tournament would make it a success. So what to make out of it?

After any tournament, whether you do well or not, there is plenty of things to learn from. It is easier to learn from tournaments where you do badly, because you (or at least me) feel bad about it and spend way more time pondering about what went wrong and what could be avoided. When I do well, I try to think about it too, but I spend way less time thinking about it, because I am happy about the result so it does not seem that important (which is a mistake).

So what went wrong and what could have I (or we) done better? Let’s try to analyze both tournaments to see what I (we) could have done better.

GP Rotterdam

1) Team : Petr Sochurek, Martin Juza

We decided few months ago that we will play this GP together and I was very happy with them, since they are both my good friends and very good players. I think it is important to play with people you go along well and know how they react in certain situations. It is also important to play with people who have similar goals as you, because when one of your teammates wants to just have fun and you want to do as well as possible, it might cause some problems. Lastly, we had great advantage of speaking Czech, so we could talk to each other in it and our opponents would not understand us.

Conclusion: I had great teammates and I do not think I could have better ones for this tournament.

2) Preparation

I think we underestimated how hard are some sealed pools to build. I cannot speak for others, I know they did some team sealeds, but I did not do any before the GP. I played some drafts to get back used to play around all the tricks, read some articles and talked to other people about it, but my preparation for building team sealed was lacking. We got punished for it by very hard and not very good sealed Day 1. We had two okay decks, but Petr had to pilot horrendous UB double 《Metalwork Colossus》 control decks with bad artifacts like multiple 《Woodweaver's Puzzleknot》, 《Ballista Charger》 with few creatures and so on. I think if we prepared bit better we might have seen this being a trap and build something else.

Conclusion: Definitely underprepared.

3) Tournament play

During the tournament, when you make a mistake, you can’t let it haunt you, you need to let it go and focus on remaining rounds. After the tournament there will be plenty of time to think it through and discuss it with friends to see if it was really a mistake and if you could have prevented it. During one of the first rounds, I was in pretty bad situation but managed to stabilize on 1 life, playing against aggressive RG deck. I started to build way better board position, even managed to start attacking, but on the last turn my opponent drew 《Chandra's Pyrohelix》 and killed me. At first it might seem that my opponent got lucky to draw his burn spell on the last possible turn. But after thinking about the situation and discussing it with Martin, we came to a conclusion that I should have attacked with one more creature turn before. It is important to try to find why did it happen and what do you need to do so it does not happen next time. I think in this situation, I was in the spot “I win unless my opponent draws burn spell in 4 turns“ and I was comfortable that I will win that game. What I did not do, was to think about if I can make the clock one turn shorter, without risking losing to more cards than just burn spells. My opponent drew the burn spell on 4th turn, but I could have made it so that he would have died on 3rd turn. Justice.

Conclusion: Huge room for improvement here. I need to slow down in games and try to figure out if I can do better than with the plan I have now or if I can improve it.

4) Sealed Pools

I think our pools were not great, especially our first one. I think this is the hardest part to evaluate. If you got lucky / unlucky with your pool / draw / matchups etc. I would advise you not to think about it much and only think about things you can affect. There is no such thing as lucky / unlucky people. Only people who prepare well and do things right and those who don’t. Yes, you might get unlucky in a tournament if you do your best or prepare the hardest. You can even get unlucky multiple tournaments in a row, which is frustrating, but in the end, you will do well in the long run.

Conclusion: It is not really important how good our pools were, because we could not affect it. It is also very easy to think we had bad pools and have it as an excuse why we did not do well, but that is not getting us anywhere.

World Magic Cup

1) Preparation

After GP, we decided to stay in Rotterdam whole week so we could prepare with team Poland for the WMC. We managed to play team sealed multiple times, discuss and test Modern deck for the metagame we anticipate. I think our preparation in Rotterdam was actually very good. But before we got to Rotterdam, we did not prepare at all. We discussed Modern decks on Facebook forum with Polish guys, but that was it. We did not play any team sealed or any modern before GP Rotterdam.

Conclusion: It is hard to prepare well for a team tournament when people have jobs and can’t take any more vacation and are from other cities. But I think we still could have tried a bit harder.

2) Tournament play

On Day 2, in our single elimination round, I played against Joel Larsson. This was when I made the biggest mistake in both tournaments. Joel was on “Infect” and I was playing “Abzan”, fine matchup for me. He even mulliganed to 5. On turn 2, he had 《Noble Hierarch》, 《Forest》, 《Breeding Pool》 and 《Viridian Corrupter》 he just cast. I started slowly with tapped 《Shambling Vent》 and had another one, so I could play only one spell on my Turn 2. He had two cards in hand and I had 《Thoughtseize》, 2 《Path to Exile》 and some other cards that are not important.

Usually, it is better to play you discards spells first, take few hits and then kill their creatures when they have no cards in hand. Not thinking about it much, I played 《Thoughtseize》, discarded a pump spell and left him with 《Gitaxian Probe》. He drew two +4/+4 pump spells and killed me. If I played 《Path to Exile》, I don’t think I could have lost.

So how did this happen? This might not be the best example, especially because how bad my play was, but this is what I think happened. I just thought I can’t lose the game (he needs to have two pump spells now and draw one more, and they have to add at least +7/+7), so I was on “autopilot”. I did not think it through, played the spell that will probably win me the game and tried to help my teamates, because this was over. It indeed was over, but in a different way.

Conclusion: I think we can see a similar problem as with the GP – I sometimes tend to play in way it is correct most of the times, but not trying to figure out if it is the best play right now. I know I need to slow down a bit and think everything through, but I just don’t do it often enough. This is a huge hole in my game and I need to work on it. I think this is the most important advice from this article. Try to look for bad habits or things that weaken your game that you do often. It is easy to see these things if you analyze your past tournaments, thinking what you did wrong and try to find if there is something that happens over and over.

To sum it up

Lukas Blohon

Lukas Blohon
He’s represented the Czech Republic on the international magic stage for a long time.
Always devoted to his goal of becoming a better magic player, as remarked on by fellow Czech pro Petr Sochurek few people work as hard as Blohon at improving their game.

Achievements include a PT: Dark Ascension Top 8, GP Brussels 2015 Champion, 6 GP Top 8’s & just recently he was the PT: Eldritch Moon Champion. Now he joins the Hareruya Pros to continue making his mark on magic history.

Read more articles by Lukas Blohon