Hello everyone!

It’s Petr again and this time around I will be talking about Pro Tour Ixalan and my preparation for it.

This Pro Tour was very different from all the previous ones I have ever played in because there was so much more time to prepare and the Draft and Standard metagame were significantly established coming into the tournament. I believe that the change is very profitable for me – I am a very hard working guy when it comes to Magic and having only couple of weeks to prepare and learn everything is very bad for me.

I have always struggled at PTs and did well at GPs because of this – in GPs you usually know what to expect and you have enough time to prepare if you are willing to invest the time. I felt good about my chances and I promised myself that I will try really hard.

I went for a short vacation to Paris with my girlfriend right after the set got spoiled out so I lost a little bit of time, but I immediately started playing 24/7 the day I came back.

Draft

The first thing I got my hands on was limited – the way I usually approach limited formats is that at the beginning I just get familiar with all the cards, figure out what’s good and find out how the main strategies should look like. I was doing pretty well and I have assembled something like 27 trophies overall. I think that my approach was bad though – I really tried to win, because it made me fell good and that meant that I was drafting the same archetypes I had a success with all over again.

Problem is that in any set there are certain archetypes that are just way better than other ones – what I mean by this is that if you assume that everyone on the table doesn’t have any color or archetype preferences, certain decks will be just better than others; let’s say that there is only 1 R/W dinosaur drafter on the table – his deck will be obscene! The same goes for vampires, merfolks etc.

It’s obviously still very important to be familiar with these archetypes, because you really want to be in those if they’re open, but that doesn’t really happen that often at the highest competition like the Pro Tour.

What I should have done is to get familiar with all the fringe strategies – not only you might find something that is really good and no one is drafting it, you will also get to know what should all the decks look like and which cards you should prioritize. I think that at least once in five drafts at the PT you are in a draft spot in which you are supposed to draft a deck like this and it can be tournament devastating if you’re not comfortable with it and the possibility of trainwrecking is very high.

I think I knew about all the possible decks, but I just wasn’t really sure about many things – do you take 《Pirate's Prize》 or some good creature or trick when drafting U/R 《Makeshift Munitions》 control? I am not really sure. It’s just important to realize that it’s just a waste of time to draft the same old decks that you already know everything about.

I am not necessarily saying that you should force those archetypes, but anytime you have a somewhat of a closer pick you should propably consider diving into a less comfortable and less discovered archetype. It is definitely harder and not so convenient to dive out of your comfort zone, but it can easily save your upcoming tournament.

My second draft at the Pro Tour backfired exactly from this reason – I got passed and 《Overflowing Insight》 on 5th pick – clear sign I should just draft a blue treasure control – getting that card so late means that it should be super open and even though it’s not where I would usually like to be in Ixalan limited, it is certainly good if you get all the good cards you need. Problem was that I didn’t have enough practice and my pick order was a little off. It is certainly something that I have to work on for future!

Standard

After a week of endless drafting I decided to start playing Standard – I couldn’t really imagine that there would objectively be something better than Temur Energy so I just bought it online and tried to master it as much as possible. I was expecting to do badly at the beginning, because I wasn’t that experienced with it and I thought that everyone online will be gunning against it, but I was crushing.

I think that huge part of it was that most of the people just wanted to try some of the new possible decks and Temur was just praying on those – the cards in the deck are just so powerful that all you need to do is to slightly shift your main deck and sideboard to fight those decks and they can’t really do anything about it – the combination of 《Rogue Refiner》, 《Chandra, Torch of Defiance》 and 《Vraska, Relic Seeker》 combined with distruption is just too much to overcome.

I got into the States feeling very good about my chances and I met with most of my teammates on Thursday before GP Phoenix. I didn’t do great at the GP, but I didn’t really expect to do well as I didn’t do any Sealeds (excluding pre-release) and the format is wastely different from Draft.

It’s closer to a Draft than in other formats – some people will just open enough playable in a tribe and you have to build your deck with that in mind and not die to random creatures backed up by combat tricks. There are a lot of Sealed formats in which all you have to do is to just maximize on lategame – big creatures and answers, but this one is a little different.

Despite doing poorly at the GP I still liked my chances in the next week – I was winning a lot on modo and I knew my deck in and out.

Most of my team left for Albequerque on Sunday, whereas me and Lukas Blohon left on Monday evening. I didn’t actually mind that at all, because it meant I can battle Lukas in the hotel lobby the entire day. I love playing against Lukas, because we go way back and no matter what we play we always try our hardest to beat the other – no game is for free!

Image Copyright: Wizards of the Coast

We got a little unlucky as our flight got delayed and we arrived to our airbnb house late after midnight, but fortunately most of the guys were still awake. I would like to say one thing; I joined the team Genesis + Revelation for this season and even though I expected it to be fun, the group completely exceeded my expectations – everyone was extremely nice, fun and also super dedicated and hard working.

Right after we arrived Brad has come to us with what they’ve found during the day of testing – they really liked Sultai Energy. Their reasoning made sense – it is bad against the regular Temur with 《Glorybringer》, but they expected people to shave on those and play more Gods and 《Vraska, Relic Seeker》 to fight the mirror. There were even lists playing 0 dragons and going as far as playng 《Gonti, Lord of Luxury》s main etc.

Another good factor going for the deck was that everyone will play dozens of games against Temur, but Sultai was a different beast and people are way more likely to make mistakes against it to make your win percentage higher. I liked the deck in theory, but I played with it a couple of times and I just didn’t like it. It’s type of a strategy that I am not really that good at and I was afraid that I would be playing bad and get crushed. I decided to stick to my energy deck and this is a list that me Thomas Hendriks and Lukas Blohon ended up playing:

The first thing you will propably notice is that we didn’t play any 《Longtusk Cub》 – most likely a mistake. The reason was that we wanted to be as favored in the mirror as possible and 《Longtusk Cub》 was one of the weaker cards (especially on the draw), but that was propably just a bad thinking. I think that not playing 《Longtusk Cub》 gives you additional points in the mirror, but not enough to justify the loss in other matchups.

It’s just not a great strategy to play bunch of reactive cards (counts even more for Pro Tours), because you can just missread the metagame or get a bad pairing where your cards aren’t as useful and you will lose.

Basically what it does is that you have less free wins and you get “unlucky” more often. Being proactive with cards that are useful in most of the matchups and then potentially board some of those cards for postboard games (you already know what you play against and you can just adjust your deck with specific disruption etc.) is usually the way to go. This Pro Tour was a little specific, because it was obvious that there will be an insane amount of energy decks in the field but still.

The card that has overperformed for us was 《Chandra, Torch of Defiance》 – it’s completely ridiculous in a lot of matchups and it’s often unbeatable on the play. The downside is that you can just play an overcosted removal spell, but I think that the upside highly outmatches that. If I was playing the tournament tommorow I would most likely move the third copy to the main.

My record in constructed was 6-4, which is not horrendous, but I played really poorly in a lot of games and I need to work on that. I think that the main reason is that previously I would frequently go to a local game stores to play paper magic and I don’t really do that nowadays.

It doesn’t seem that way but playing online is a lot different than playing in real life – you have to take care of your cards; actually physically play them, which uses up a lot of your energy and focus and you can get easily distracted if you are not used to it. Another difference is that on modo you can take a lot of time in the difficult turns, but you can’t really do that in real life Magic.

Another thing is that I was simply not trying as hard – I am often 2lazy” to go through all the possibilites and outcomes thinking that it will not matter etc. And then some obscure thing happens and I lose because of it – yeah you can easily blame it on unluck because of how unlikely was that thing to happen, but that is just a wrong mentality.

I will try my hardest to improve and do better next time.

Thanks for reading,

Petr