Deck Selection

Today's Soundtrack: https://open.spotify.com/track/3Q6VfeIZ1bTjWiNe2Or4LQ?si=2c4d302c88884770

This week I want to tackle a topic that I think is one of the most stressful, and also most systematically mismanaged ones, from what I've seen from myself and my fellow players.

It's time to talk about deck selection for constructed tournaments!

Table of Contents

• Take it Seriously

• Card Availability

• Why are the Good decks Good?

• When to Deviate

• The Long Term/Conclusions

Take it Seriously

Quick question:

How important would you say drafting skill is to success in Limited?

Pretty fucking important, right? Something you should spend a lot of time on and absolutely must become a well-rounded player in if you want to win?

Now what about deck selection for Constructed? Do competitive players seem to treat it with the same importance?

Yeah... not really.

I don't mean to be all high & mighty with this, but it's been really astounding to see how differently people approach constructed tournament preparation than Limited. In constructed, a lot of what I see is players being familiar with one or two decks in a format, and typically shaping their approach to the format through the lens of those archetypes. The amount of times I've seen some form of "you know I'll just be jamming [pet card/pet deck]" in response to legitimate discussion about what might be a strong choice for a particular tournament is kind of bonkers for a game whose other aspects we take as seriously as we do.

Don't get me wrong, specialty matters, and there are reasons why it's better in Constructed - You will only be rewarded for knowing one deck deeply at any given tournament, and there is usually too much to explore to become familiar with everything, so it makes sense to cultivate expertise. We'll touch on the ways to factor in familiarity in this piece, but upfront I mainly want to emphasize that this cannot be the biggest part of your reasoning when talking about one of the most important factors in tournament success.

But I think most players who aspire to the highest levels of competitive Magic lean too far into specialization. Decks become personalities, expertise becomes lane, and we end up hamstringing ourselves from building a robust skillset in the same way that Limited players are forced to do by nature of the format.

The ability to make a quality deck choice for any constructed tournament you are trying to win, regardless of format, is as crucial to success as knowing how to draft a variety of archetypes in limited.

It's important. Let's treat it as such.

Card Availability

Today I'm going to talk about the factors I believe should be most important for deciding which deck you're going to play in a constructed tournament, but first I want to get out of the way the one factor that, in an ideal world, wouldn't exist, but nevertheless is important to address.

This is the framing I want to use for card availability: It's a real constraint, but our goal should be to minimize its importance, not figure out how to factor it into our decision-making.

There are many ways to minimize the restrictions of card availability - The most important one is making connections in the Magic community, which you should already be doing for other reasons!

Don't be ashamed of asking about borrowing cards. Most people are happy to do so, as they get to feel like they contributed to someone's tournament success and their cards get used! The worst that can happen is you don't get any responses, and even then you can try again elsewhere. Ask your store if they'll lend you some of the cards you need if you forfeit some prizes! Get creative with it! Again, the worst someone can say is no.

There are also restrictions to card availability in digital play, but there are ways to get around most of these these too:

• MTGO has rental services that will allow you to 'rent out' a certain ticket value of cards at a time for a much lower subscription price than the cards would cost. For example, https://www.cardhoarder.com/ will let you rent decks worth up to 500 tickets for just $12.50 a week. That's $50 for access to essentially every deck in whichever format you're preparing for for a month.

• $50 too much? Got some friends who are willing to play with you? Cockatrice is a great tool that allows you to play with any cards for free. It doesn't keep the Magic rules engine for you and generally has far fewer and less competitive players than MTGO or Arena, but if you have dedicated testing partners, that isn't a problem, and can even be an advantage in certain ways when you want to break the rules to test specific things.

• For Arena, you're kind of out of luck unless you've been playing Limited for a long time or money isn't an issue. My best advice would just be to save wildcards for tournament prep, invest in lands before anything else, and play a lot of limited (if you can afford it/are good enough where it's free).

In short: Card availability matters, and will sometimes be a restriction depending on your situation, but there are ways to work around it. Deal with it as a restriction, don't use it as an excuse.

Why are the good decks good?

Now we're getting into the meat of things. Most of the time, there will be a set of 1-3 "best decks" in a format you're preparing for. I believe the best way to frame the deck selection process is to ask ourselves "Should I play the best deck?", and be genuinely open to either answer.

This is a framing that inherently biases us towards the top decks in a format, so it's important to justify that. It's obvious that Magic is a dynamic, complex game where if you know what your opponent is doing, you can usually figure out a plan that will beat them. If a deck is known, and everyone has a plan for playing against it, why might it still be the best choice?

• Sometimes decks are broken

There comes a certain point where a deck is so good, that even strategies fully devoted to hating it can only get to a 50% winrate (or worse). When this happens, it is impossible to adjust to a deck, and it's inevitable that it will get banned.

But bans don't happen the second a format gets broken, and there are tournaments to play in the meantime. One of the biggest advantages you can gain in Magic is playing decks that are about to be banned while they are still legal. Hogaak, Caw blade, Nadu, Splinter Twin, Melira Pod, I'm sure I'm forgetting many, all of these decks never cracked 50% of the meta for an extended period of time, if at all. Being better than the average player at deck selection during these periods is easy, but somehow most people still fail to do it. Don't be one of those people.

• If a deck has been at the top for a long time without being banned, it's probably resilient

Magic has metagaming and the ability to counteract strategies, but it also has dynamic strategies that are hard to tamp down completely. A lot of the time a best deck's "main plan" will include powerful interactions between cards that are totally fine on their own as well, and this can be very difficult to effectively fight, because there is always a cost to disrupting the opponent's plan, which is that you lose some ability to develop your own. If the opponent is playing mono-good-cards, you likely need more than the ability to interrupt their plan.

• If it's been at the top for a long time, it's probably flexible

You also have to consider that the good decks can adjust too! Typically these decks have multiple tools for interaction and space in the sideboard for bringing in different threats or answers, and can take drastically different approaches to a field depending on the matchups they expect.

• Sometimes the best decks are gated by playskill

A lot of the time, the best decks will be hard to play. These properties of resiliency and flexibility often come with some level of complexity in design and implementation, and while the best players will know how to get the most out of them, not everyone will. This can often result in a situation where a deck is good enough to be banned, but hard enough to play that it doesn't need to be. The classic example of this is the Amulet Titan copypasta:

Amulet has remained tier 0 or 1 through metas with KCI, Hogaak, Eldrazi, Oko, Opal, Cruise/Dig Through Time, looting/Grave Troll, Uro, Prowess, Lurrus/Yorion decks, and to this day. The deck is always the most broken thing in modern and just avoids bans by being hard to play.

If the best deck requires deep expertise, often not many people will be willing to play it because they're worried about losing to better players in mirror matches and generally losing more than they know they "should" because of their own mistakes. It's really easy to fall into this trap, but that makes it all the more important to avoid. Losing because of your own playskill feels really bad, but our goal is to maximize our winrate, not minimize our chances to make mistakes. Moreover, the only way to get better at something is to do it. You have to be bad at playing any deck before you can be good at it.

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So how do we identify broken decks and know when playing them is correct? The first thing to look out for is simply sustained success at high sample sizes. If everyone knows a deck is good, but the deck keeps winning at high rates, you absolutely must investigate why this is and if it's possible to legitimately beat the deck if you want to justify not playing it.

Sustained success might look like:

• Being the most played deck at a professional tournament and still winning 55%+ of its' matches

• Consistently showing up in top 8s and MTGO results even when other lists are clearly gunning for it

• Being a top deck in a format through multiple shifts/bans/new sets

If you're seeing a deck do these things, you need to have a very good reason not to A) Learn how to play it and B) register it.

So let's talk about what those reasons might look like!

When to Deviate

So you can probably tell that my general constructed philosophy is to play the best deck and focus on your gameplay. This correlates to my belief that gameplay is the biggest edge to be gained in Limited, but it's pretty orthogonal to my Limited style of maximally exploring a format and drafting whatever's open at your seat.

It also differs significantly from my only deck choice for a high level tournament so far, Quintorious combo.

What gives?

Let's talk about the reasons you might not play the best deck.

Playskill Disadvantage

In the abstract and the long term, I think learning how to play the top decks is the correct strategy, but sometimes in the short term you need to make a different choice to optimize winrate. This is especially true if you're not able to practice heavily for a tournament, but sometimes it is even true when you can, but are not able to get to the necessary level to compete.

I hope I've been clear about this before, but I was extremely close to registering Proft Phoenix for the AC5. A few weeks out from the tournament, I fundamentally didn't think I was going to be able to beat very good players with the deck, but I did think I'd be able to beat them with Quint, because it is a deck that erases a lot of the impact of playskill, replacing it instead with matchup strength and pure familiarity with the Quint combo.

At this point, I was about 3 months into playing constructed seriously for the first time again in many, many years, going up against a field of extremely experienced players (some of them limited specialists, but many of them seasoned pros and constructed specialists).

I played Quint primarily because I thought it gave me the best chance to win matches against players who were better than me.

If you run out of time, sometimes you will need to make choices like this, and that's okay. Clearly you can still have success with them!

Of course, make sure the deck that requires less playskill actually DOES give you an advantage over simply playing the good deck badly. I only was able to make this choice because Quint was also well positioned at the time, and I got even more lucky that half the field happened to be Vampires, one of our best matchups.

• Sometimes you find something unknown or underrated

I still have no idea how we found the Gyruda Quint list, but it was somehow a deck that all of us won a lot with on ladder that no one else seemed to care about or respect. I think this is quite a rare phenomenon, but it's very possible in Magic. A lot of the time this happens when the "stock" version of a deck is poorly built, and finding a better version requires playing some really unexpected cards. The stock version gets played and the deck doesn't seem very impressive, and when people play against the better version and lose, they write it off as a fluke.

Be willing to trust your own data over the opinions of the community. If you're winning with a deck, especially if you're doing something concretely different with it than most do, and have good theory behind it, it's likely real.

(That being said, it's important to try to prove yourself wrong too by playing against your worst matchups and playing against good players, not just ladder opponents. Trust but verify.)

• Sometimes a format is unsolved

I haven't had experience yet with this situation, but I think this is somewhat likely to be the case going into Worlds. New Standard definitely has a lot of strategies that are showing up consistently, but nothing has pulled away and started to dominate the metagame yet.

This is obviously a place where playing the "best deck" is not really possible, but that doesn't mean people won't try to do it! Whatever is showing up the most in this case can often contribute to a groupthink snowball, and if people are all trying to fight against known decks that aren't inherently very strong, it's a good time to try and do something more out of left field. At the very least, you'll gain an information advantage - but it's important to make sure you can actually beat a reasonable portion of the current popular decks.

• Sometimes the "best decks" are being carried by playskill, not dragged down by it

The flipside to a broken deck that is only truly unfair in the hands of its expert pilots is a deck that is only medium, but flexible enough to carry a strong constructed player to wins over weaker opponents. This is a real phenomenon that is important to recognize when it's happening.

The classic version of this is a "50% midrange deck", where given equal playskill, the deck is only even in every matchup, but gives a good player room to win a lot just by being better than their opponents.

If you see a deck consistently being played but not having a great winrate, or only being advocated by players who have played with it a long time and are putting up... good, but not great results, that's an opportunity to be suspicious. If the deck is easy to feel like you have an advantage against it, but never out of any matchup, you might be looking at a 50% midrange deck (maybe even the dreaded 45% midrange).

• Magic is hard and there is edge to be gained

Magic is a very difficult game. Keeping up with even a single constructed format to the point where you're familiar with every matchup would be a full-time job, and almost no one does this. Instead, people copy decks that are successful and learn individual decks deeply. Card availability is also always a relevant barrier. Metagames don't adapt at the speed of light or even the speed of sound, they adapt at a brisk walk at best.

This means that spending more effort trying to get an advantage in deck construction is almost always worth it. This might look like tuning the best deck to beat the mirror without sacrificing other matchups, but it might also look like working really hard on an under-appreciated strategy to attack a specific metagame for a specific tournament. The key is to listen to what the work is telling you and instead of trusting your ideas blindly, verifying them as much as you can through preparation.

In short, there's no substitute for outworking everybody.

The Long Term / Conclusions

Deck Selection is arguably the most stressful, least fun part of preparing for a Magic tournament. Most competitive players I know don't feel "good" about their deck choice until the submission deadline has passed and it's out of their hands, if they even do then.

It's important to remember that you will hit and you will miss, and it won't always be easy to tell. Deck selection comes before all the other factors that lead to tournament results, so it's both one of the most baseline skills that affects everything else, and the most chronologically removed from the results themselves, which makes it hard to disentangle as a factor that's leading you to winning or losing.

My best advice for deck selection is to treat it like a valuable skill that is important to take as seriously as any other Magic skill. Evaluate your choices with a critical eye, be honest when you think you've made mistakes, but be willing to take informed risks as long as you learn from them.

Most importantly, put in the work. You won't learn without trying to deep dive on formats and come to conclusions about how to attack them, and you certainly won't win if you're not getting the reps ahead of the tournament anyways.

But like I said in my testing diary right before the Arena Championship, there is a place for the work and there comes a time when that work is over.

Just as important as doing the work is making sure you leave that work in the past when the time for it is over. No one is going to be a perfect deck selector. You have a responsibility to try to do it well, and to hopefully improve at it over time. Expecting to never miss is a recipe for stagnation, and preparing like you think you're more likely to miss than to hit is a sign you're probably not trying hard enough.

So get out there and try!