·6 min read
AC5 Testing Diary #4
Today’s soundtrack:
https://open.spotify.com/track/4eklSuk7sHcFDVLQR74QLn?si=3cc6011126b34075
Why do you love Magic?
I love Magic because it is an endeavor that requires analytical heft to get into, but the deeper you get, the more “soft” skills are required. These have typically been the things that captivate and carry a feeling of artistic/intellectual value for me. I’m not sure why this is the pattern, but I’m very sure it’s a deep part of who I am. This might be a bit more “diary entry” than “testing report”, but that’s the vibe today and we’re going with it.
The past few months have carried with them huge changes in my life. I left my job, prepared for my first professional tournament, gave myself permission to be a beginner at something (multiple things, really a silly amount of things), and have done so many things I had previously written off for myself. It’s felt at times overwhelming, at times extremely exciting, at times frustrating, at times scary, at times wonderful, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
I’m extremely grateful for the new Magic friends I’ve made during this process, mostly through the “AC5 War Room” team I’ve been preparing with, which includes other competitors Ethan, GlosuU, Inflamed, BigMits and Raph, as well as some “helpers” like Paul, and of course Mora. These folks have all been wonderful companions and collaborators who I hope & expect will stay friends after the tournament.
After Chicago, we took a few days to regroup and begin the Explorer testing process. As a team made of mostly limited players, I think we all felt varying degrees of discomfort and dread about the prospect of getting ourselves to “expert” level in a type of Magic we’ve, to different extents, avoided as much as possible in our journeys to the top.
I expect I was on the extreme end of this spectrum. I knew I had a full month to practice, but the practice often felt like work rather than play. I was playing plenty, and learning, but also finding myself getting burnt out quickly and wanting to do other things with my time (the chronic pain didn’t help with this, it usually doesn’t).
Still, I got my reps in and by mid-month, felt familiar with basically every major deck in the format and had useful opinions about what was good & what wasn’t. Everyone on the team at this point was going through a similar cycle: go through a good stretch on the ladder with a new deck, feel unbeatable with it, start running into variance or bad matchups, lose, despair. Rinse, repeat.
This is a normal part of the testing process just like it’s a normal part of the scientific process. You’ve gotta let yourself hypothesize, follow your instincts, and then allow your hypotheses to be falsified. Feeling dumb and lost is how you learn. If you avoid this feeling, you won’t learn. It’s that simple. Letting the raw results challenge your beliefs, and yes, your ego, is crucial for preparing well.
That being said… there is a point where treating something as art rather than science can lead to a breakthrough. There are only so many days in a month, and at the end of that month there’s a tournament to play. You have to register a deck for that tournament, and then you have to play that deck well against some of the best players in the world. Or at least, I have to. Learning, being humbled, and gathering information is cool & all, but there is a time limit. At some point you must break out of that cycle and make choices.
During testing, there was one deck I kept coming back to, one deckbox icon I actually felt excited to select and queue up a ladder match with. I’d developed a crush on everyone’s favorite Big Girl Dino Hippo, Keruga the Macrosage:
This deck is funky. It’s playing exclusively cards with mana cost 4 or greater, most 6 or greater, in a nonrotating format where most of the best decks are loaded with 1-and 2-drops. It makes sense why experienced players would write something like this off from being a serious contender. By all known laws of Magic theory, there’s no way for this dino hippo to “fly” at a high-level tournament.
And yet, Quint combo has stuck around on the fringes of the format for a while. Inflamed was the first of our team to put us onto it - he was having lots of success with almost this exact list all the way back in January. A lot of us, myself included, were skeptical at first, though obviously impressed with the results. Moreover, this felt like a relatively simple deck to play, something us Limited players were craving. If this deck were truly good, we’d have an easy “out” from having to learn the intricate play patterns of something like Izzet Phoenix.
As good “rational” players, we were all both excited by the prospect of this deck and skeptical that it would end up being the right choice. We were aware of our biases against the kinds of decks that would be intimidating to pilot, and I personally didn’t want to let a fear of seeming like an inadequate technical player keep me from making the “correct” decision.
Still… I couldn’t keep myself away from the dinos, hippos, dogs and elephants of the world. 2 weeks out from deck registration, when I was telling myself I should be practicing Phoenix mirrors, I found myself instead burying my Arena opponents under a mountain of Quintorius triggers. People would consistently play poorly against this deck, I think because they were underestimating and misunderstanding it. My opponents were treating me like a combo deck that they could keep under wraps through interaction and hand disruption — And then I’d topdeck a Carnosaur off the top and none of that would matter. I was stacking up wins and having fun, and it felt like I knew something everyone else didn’t - The big dumb creatures had too much inevitability.
It’s not like there aren’t bad matchups. Anything that can kill a turn faster than this deck on average (something that isn’t very hard to draw up) is pretty advantaged. In the current metagame, that looks like Amalia combo & the slew of aggro decks, which we definitely expect to show up. Plus, surely Arena Championship competitors won’t make the same mistakes against this deck that ladder opponents do… right?
Probably not. But maybe — Magic players, even good ones, are humans, just like me, and don’t have time to learn all the intricacies of a format and often come to incorrect conclusions about things. The balance between playing “the best deck” and bringing your own brew is always tricky. The good decks are good for a reason — they’re resilient and powerful, hard to dominate and easy to underestimate. But if you can find an unexpected strategy that legitimately works, you gain meaningful advantages - ones that I might need as a weaker technical player.
I was able to sway two other teammates, Ethan and GlosuU, over to the Discover bandwagon, and together we’ve been tuning it to shore up the weaker matchups and learning how to play against good pilots (thanks Paul & Mora!) wielding the big boys of Phoenix, RB Vampires, and Amalia. The winrates against players who knew what’s up were significantly lower than our results against the public, but that’s to be expected. At the end of the day, I’ll take a 55% deck into the field if that’s what I can achieve. I’ve done better with worse (and worse with better, of course!)
At the end of the day, anyone can win a Magic tournament. If you know what’s going on, you can win even if you make mistakes - you just have to get lucky. On the flipside, even if you are the best player in the room, you still have to get lucky to come out on top. I won’t make blanket statements like “you’ll never win if you don’t believe you can”. Sometimes you will! And sometimes you’ll lose even if you know you’re better than everyone else.
But one thing I know is that true success lies not in winning, but in maximizing your chances to win. Also known as trying. One thing I do believe is that you won’t try if you don’t believe you can earn an edge over the field. I believe our team has put in the work to earn that edge — I’m hopeful it pays off for us, but most importantly, I’m proud of us for the mix of smarts & guts it took to get here.
I’m the best fucking Magic player in this room (ok, virtual tournament, but that’s not as catchy).
Let’s go win this thing.
Originally published on Patreon.