How to *Actually* Play Izzet Prowess

Table of Contents

• Intro

• Copypasta Time

• Omniscience Schmomniscience

• The Mirror

• The Great Mono Red Panic

• The List

• Sideboarding & the Two Plans

• What's Next?

Intro

I've already written one article about how to play Izzet Prowess.

Before my 4-5 finish at RC Hartford, I wrote a guide to the Swiftspear-less list my team was bringing and how to approach each matchup with it.

Though I didn't do well personally, our team put up a 65% winrate, got 4 people to the Pro Tour, and one to Worlds. It was clear that our list was strong enough to win with good piloting and reasonable luck.

Afterwards, I wrote this piece trying to grapple with what had happened. Hartford was the first tournament that had gone badly for me in over a year, but I didn't want to chalk it all up (on either side) to luck.

I had done a lot of work on the deck for that tournament -- but looking back on it now, I'm amazed at how many things in that article I ended up flipping on during PT testing.

For RC Hartford, I spent a lot of time playing on Arena ladder and tuning the deck to beat the decks that had been preying on average prowess pilots.

For PT Final Fantasy, I was almost exclusively doing focused testing against Sanctum's strongest pilots, both as prowess and as the villain trying to beat it.

Longtime readers will not be shocked at which method I feel came to better answers.

This piece started with the intention of being a deck guide, but with the standard bannings that just happened, that doesn't seem like the most useful content anymore! However, I still think it's very valuable to look into how and why the team came to the conclusions we did - Feeling out the structural forces that define a format is one of the best tools you can have for getting ahead in a new one.

So let's start from the beginning. Why Prowess? And why specifically Vivi-Swiftspear-Wild Ride prowess?

Copypasta Time

Cutter remained tier 0 or 1 through metas with Jeskai Oculus, Mono Red Aggro, Jeskai Control, Omniscience combo, Boomer Dimir, Black Demons, and BW Pixie, and to this day. The deck is always the most broken thing in standard and just avoids bans by being hard to play.

Prowess is/was a weird deck. It plays at least one broken card (Cori-Steel Cutter), and lots of other cards that people will argue are too strong (Vivi Ornitier, Stock Up, Stormchaser's Talent, Monstrous Rage).

It has curves that no other deck in the format can beat without interacting. Turn 1 Talent into Turn 2 Cutter into Turn 3 Cutter + Cantrip means that almost any hand with some spells in it will kill on turn 4.

But it also can seem somewhat fragile. The deck can easily run out of gas if you don't draw your Stock Ups, and is weak to hate pieces like Temporary Lockdown, Authority of the Consuls, and High Noon.

It only put up a 49% winrate at this Pro Tour. So why, Ryan, were you so convinced this was the best deck in standard, and its banning was heavily deserved??

The short version is that I've tried very hard to beat the best players piloting prowess, and it's almost impossible.

Here's the longer version.

I didn't want to register prowess for this tournament. One of the things I care about most in my tournament prep is finding a meaningful "deck edge", and we knew a lot of people were going to show up with Prowess. Playing the most popular deck limits the amount of deck edge you can gain, because everyone will be prepared for you to some extent. As such, I and the rest of the team spent the weeks leading up to the testing house trying to find any deck that felt meaningfully ahead against prowess:

I do think we got a bit misled with the early results against red. This is an unavoidable hazard in testing - you will likely encounter a run of variance that's hard to see and influences your takeaways. The thing that happened here was that we went into the testing house week believing Mono Red was a difficult, but totally solvable matchup for Prowess as long as prowess was willing to play some respectful number of removal spells. Now, I believe that Red is distinctly favored into Prowess, and it might be the only deck that can claim that title. Still, our learning that prowess needed a lot of removal to help the red matchup was pointing us in the right direction. More on this later.

Omniscience Schmomniscience

What was the main takeaway from all of our testing?

Mainly, it was that prowess can beat anything as long as it has a good plan.

Whatever we threw against prowess, it felt like things would look promising at first, and then the prowess pilot would figure out how to adapt and start winning at an even or better rate.

The most glaring example of prowess's plans being the hinge factor almost everywhere was the Omni matchup.

Here's what I said about the Omni matchup in my article before Hartford:

I agree with basically none of this today, at least in the postboard games.

Playing against Gabe on Omni, I felt like I couldn't win. He's a great pilot, and for sure had slightly better-than-average draws in the first sets we played, but I kept losing even to the medium draws. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. There didn't seem to be enough space to both apply any reasonable amount of pressure and leave up interaction, and even when you did that, you'd get blown out by a Cavern of Souls naming dragon and a Marang River Regent coming down to undo all the tempo you'd gained.

Everything changed when I saw Paul play the matchup. Some of his favorite phrases were...

"Not attacking is nice!"

"Did you know you get to cast your spells whenever you want? Not casting spells is broken"

"I feel like I can't lose"

It turns out that Omni actually relies quite a lot on its opponents actively playing into its interaction in the early turns to help it sculpt a hand and run you out of gas before they start to take over. If you simply refuse to play this game and patiently get set up, they usually have very few productive things to do, and you get to position yourself to both cover their clunky combo lines and explode for a kill any time they try to tap out for a midrange threat.

The two biggest parts of this are not attacking into Ephara's dispersal and not deploying your graveyard hate until there's an Omniscience in the yard.

So often before I'd be deploying my ghost vacuums to double-spell with my cutters because I thought I had to get them dead and force them to have both lockdown and combo, but I'd just end up losing to lockdown + random stuff. It turns out that if your opponent doesn't have any board presence or proactive ways to slow you down, it's easy for you to go slow and take your time setting up a one-turn-kill.

As long as you don't freak out about killing them quickly, you'll be totally fine most of the time. The countermagic and graveyard hate makes postboard games completely different from preboard games in this way, because when you answer Omni's combo, you ANSWER it, and it usually takes them a long time to rebuild - long enough that you get to rebuild your one-turn-kill much faster.

This completely broke my limited player brain that only understands curveouts and maximizing board impact. The experience of going from hopeless to extremely confident in a matchup purely based on this mindset shift was a really formative one for me. It reemphasized how much room there still is in Magic for skill expression and knowledge advantage even at the highest levels.

While I was learning this, we were also learning that the matchup got even better with Vivi. Most omni lists had zero answers for her maindeck and very few out of the board. We probably should have tested more intentionally against lists that would be prepared for Vivi - team Cosmos brought a list with 4 maindeck answers that I thought was really well-crafted. Still, even though we were aware this might happen, having a must-kill threat that didn't die to lockdown and was hard to counter felt pretty backbreaking for Omniscience's chances of turning this into a favorable matchup, even with a very respectful list.

To give an example of Vivi's strength in the matchup, I won a game at the PT with her after missing my second land drop for not one, not two, not three, but FOUR turns.

Game 3 against an Omni list with only 2 hard answers to Vivi in the 75, on the play, I kept this 6-card hand:

Here's how the game went, to the best of my memory (it's probably wrong in some spots but the shape is correct):

• Turn 1 I sleighted, saw 2 spells, and took a Soul-Guide Lantern.

• Turn 2, I drew a second Vivi, went to discard instead of playing my talent, and spell pierced their Roiling Dragonstorm.

• Turn 3 I drew another spell, and played my talent. I think they played a surveil land and passed.

• Turn 4 I drew Negate, and passed. They played an Overlord of the Mistmoors.

• Turn 5 I cast Soul-Guide. They attacked me and had no play.

• Turn 6 I finally drew my second land, played it, and passed with Negate up. They played a Scrollshift on their Overlord and I negated.

• Turn 7 I drew my third land and played a Vivi. They cast Ephara's Dispersal on it, binned an Omni, thought for a while, and cast Abuelo's, forcing me to crack my Soul-Guide.

• Turn 8 I drew my 4th land, played Vivi, Wild Rided it, cast a bunch of spells, bounced their Overlord and Fallaji with Into the Flood Maws, and attacked them down to 2 with Vivi and Otter. On their turn they replayed Fallaji, found a dispersal with it, bounced my Vivi, and could have attacked me down to 1 with their insects, but chose to leave one back (correctly).

• Turn 9 I played Vivi, cast a cantrip, and cast another cantrip, killing them.

I'm going to remember this game for a long time. I was 1-3, fighting for my professional Magic life, and was sure I was done for. Did I get lucky to draw the 3rd and 4th lands immediately after the second? Sure, a bit. Did my opponent have a bit of an awkward draw that made the game play out in a very particular way that I could win while missing land drops? For sure. Was the hand a keep? Definitely. Did I make any mistakes? I don't think so, I think I played perfect Magic that was informed by the lessons I'd learned from failing repeatedly in testing. I'm very proud of that win.

My response to Omni having a positive winrate against prowess at the PT is that it's almost surely prowess pilot error. It's not usually good practice to dismiss data in this way, but in this case I have a lot of direct experiential data that paints a very clear picture of what the prowess pilots at the tournament might have been doing to lose to Omni -- exactly the same things I was doing early in testing.

So, yeah. Omniscience Schmomniscience. Deck's cool and all but it's very exploitable. Just play like Paul Green, easy.

Of course, as all of this was happening, the likelihood that we would end up registering prowess was just going up and up. So naturally, we started to care a lot about the mirror.

The Mirror

The Prowess mirror is one of the most difficult matchups I've ever encountered. Not exactly in terms of gameplay (though it's obviously quite intricate there), but in terms of figuring out what actually matters and gives either player an edge. I've never seen so many good players disagree about a matchup before, and it showed in the variety of builds people brought to the tournament, presumably expecting lots of mirror matches. Some teams were on Swiftspears and Hatchers, some on Hatchers and Vivis, and some on Swiftspears and Vivis (including us!).

I can pretty confidently say that our team did the most mirror testing out of all teams. We were a little obsessive about it. To some extent, I think this was a mistake -- we got overly dialed in on a matchup that is hard to gain edges in, even if it was 42% of the field. That being said, this excerpt from early on shaped my view of the mirror throughout, and ultimately I would still point to it as the best understanding I can give of the matchup:

This was back when we were still considering vivi + slickshot because we thought they went together in terms of deckbuilding incentives, and while this is somewhat true, it became clear quite quickly that we only wanted somewhere between 2-3 of this "all-in-one-package" threat.

What I would add to this today is that I think the first player to present one of the first two types of threats in a prowess mirror will win that game a very high % of the time. This is because there are no catchup tools in a prowess mirror. Blocking is often illegal, and your interaction is always better when you're ahead on board, because it translates to more damage. The best a player on the back foot can hope for in the mirror is to run their opponent out of gas -- a prospect that is more appealing in theory than in practice (though, of course, sometimes your opponent will flood).

Under this framework, we quickly came to the conclusion that playing 4 Swiftspears was mandatory for prowess mirrors. Having 8 prowess creatures that could be deployed while cantripping to find your second land or interacting to keep your opponent off of a strong start felt absolutely crucial for consistently getting ahead on board and presenting the "2 prowess creatures" category of threat.

Okay, so you know how I said there aren't really any catchup tools? I lied a little. Enter the Nicole Tipple special:

Two mornings before I left for Vegas, I woke up to this beauty in the testing notes channel:

For those without extremely good vision, here's the original list Nicole was running (postboard):

Now this was different!!!!!

This list started with Hatchers because of the obvious synergy with Wild Ride, and included some Pyroclasms that cft was high on as a postboard plan in the mirror as one of the only viable interactive catch-up tools to clean up a few turns of cutter triggers or an early double prowess threat development.

As a quick aside - this is the only place I'll be addressing the pyroclasm plan. Cft was clearly onto something, and ended up registering one main for the tournament while crushing us with them a lot in testing, but I was never able to make it work in mirrors on my side. It too often felt dead or unforgivably awkward to deploy. It's possible cft was doing something in gameplay that made the clasms better for them, and it's not a nonviable plan, but ultimately none of us ended up registering any because we concluded it was also not a good tool against mono red, and too high risk as a mirror strategy. Try it for yourself, maybe it clicks with you!

Back to business. In a mirror with very few ways to catch up once you fell behind on board, Wild Ride started to look like a very powerful tool.

Did you know that our opponent is dead here?

Quick primer on Vivi math -- After you cast Vivi, you essentially have a Vivi and a 1/1 prowess creature on board (cutter counts as a 0-power prowess creature where a creature will trigger prowess on it if it's the first spell you cast).

From there, we get to cast 4 spells and attack with two creatures in the end (wild ride on Vivi, make 4 mana, cast opt without needing to hit anything, tap our now 3/3 monk and spend 2 mana to flash back Wild Ride, use the last remaining mana to Shore Up the Monk, and attack).

Each spell is inherently worth 3 damage (1 prowess + 1 damage from Vivi + 1 counter on Vivi), plus any additional damage it generates.

1 damage to start (0/3 Vivi + 1/1 virtual prowess creature)

43 "spelling" triggers = 12*

3+3+1=7 (Wild Rides and Shore Up additional damage)

12+1+7=20.

Now that's what I call a catch-up plan.

Don't get me wrong - Vivi is very fragile in prowess mirrors. A single well-timed Torch the Tower or Into the Flood Maw will set you back a disastrously large amount of tempo. But what Vivi represents along with Wild Ride is a threat your opponent must always respect, or they could die the second you hit 4 mana. Regardless of tempo positioning, that's a very valuable thing to have in a matchup.

It took us a while to become confident Vivi + Wild Ride was viable in mirrors. Lots of folks on the team were skeptical up until a few days before deck submission, myself included. The times where you couldn't put all the pieces together or got blown out felt too devastating. But Nicole kept smacking us in the face with large Vivis and insisting that there was something here as long as you learned how to play the deck in a different way. Her many demoralized testing house opponents started to agree.

The moment I became convinced was playing a mirror game against Lou Salerno (@betameech on twitter). I was on the draw, and Lou curved Swiftspear into Cutter into Swiftspear-spell-spell, attacking me down to 8 on turn 3, with a board of 3 prowess creatures and plenty of cards still in hand.

Unfortunately for Lou, my curve had been Swiftspear into Stormchaser's Talent + Wild Ride (9 damage), into cantrip + cantrip + the second Wild Ride on the following turn. (11 damage).

By all rights I should have lost this game. Knowing I have the second Wild Ride and two Monstrous Rages in my deck, Lou could have chosen to leave back a blocker and basically ensure victory, since he had the board advantage with a cutter out.

But what I realized was that there was literally no other card we could play that would have disrupted normal play patterns enough to give me even a remote shot of winning that game. Wild Ride was the catchup tool. I started to notice that while other cards deemed "good in the mirror" might have seemed "better" in other games, it was rarely true that they actually swung the game from one that I was going to lose to one that I could win. It was just too hard to turn the tempo around after falling behind unless you used drastic tools like this.

To be clear, the original inclusion of Vivi in the list was primarily informed by the fact that that the card is kind of absurd in any "other" matchup where you're not under a large amount of pressure right away. For a while, we were on 2 in the main and 1 in the side. Drawing 1 was always at least acceptable, but drawing 2 was a scary prospect against a field where we expected lots of prowess and mono red. However, as time went on, we grew higher and higher on Vivi even in these more tempo-oriented matchups -- including it becoming our primary gameplan against Red.

The Great Mono Red Panic

I don't have as many screenshots of this one, because it happened almost entirely in-house. But what ended up happening is that in the final 24 hours before deck submission, we started to realize that the Mono Red deck wasn't just good into prowess, it might be great into us. That was very concerning.

We'd been highly aware of this matchup for weeks, and thought we had a good plan. But our testing started to show stronger and stronger results for red as time went on, and in the last few days, we decided to really focus in on the matchup and try to build a strong plan for it. The issue? Nothing was working.

We tried being hyper-aggressive with Swiftspears and Wild Rides. This tended to work decently on the play, but when we switched up our testing to always put prowess on the draw (as winning on the draw would be crucial to winning matches), it started to fall apart. We tried being hyper-controlling, boarding in all of our removal spells, bringing out cantrips and leaving in Stock Ups. We tried Pyroclasm, we tried extra Shock-like removal, we tried Basilisk Collar, we even tried Caelorna, Sea Tyrant (that one was my idea - it was fine, but not good enough).

The plan that actually ended up showing promise was the one we were the quickest to immediately discard. Enter now-Sanctum-vs-red-staple, Dissection Tools.

The concept of playing a 5-drop in a deck allergic to cards that cost more than 2, in the matchup where we're the most on the back foot, seemed nuts at first. I was dismissive of it even as Jason beat me a few times with it in our first matches trying it out (against Jason, it's often hard to tell when you're losing to getting skill diffed vs. losing to the new cards it's trying 😂).

Let's let Jason put it in her own words:

This plan came together extremely last-minute, so late that many folks on the team didn't buy into it enough to fully adopt it. I was highly skeptical just an hour before I went to bed, complaining to Jason that I wasn't comfortable making such drastic changes to our deck and sideboard mapping last minute, worried that I was losing too much equity in other matchups for a new plan that we might only be implementing postboard, on the draw.

I decided to play a few matches against Lou & Sam (@IslandGoSAMe) to either sell myself on or off of it. After those games, nearly all of which involved postboard Vivi & Tools carrying me to victory where no other cards would have, I was sold. I even advocated to Jason that we should be implementing the plan on the play postboard too, keeping in our Sleights over 1 Ride and 1 Rage, to ensure we could hit our land drops while not needing as much "explosi-VIVI-ty" since we were on the front foot.

Retroactively, the theory here is sound. Mono Red postboard often tries to play like a prison deck against Izzet, where the Izzet player's life total is the "lock" condition. Sure, Izzet can board in a ton of removal to deal with most of Red's threats, but as that's happening, the Izzet player's life total is being slowly whittled down. With a magebane in play and the opponent at 6 life, there is a finite number of spells the Izzet player can cast before they lose the game. Dissection Tools breaks the Izzet player out of this paradigm completely, so it's worth spending an entire turn to cast it most of the time. It also closes games absurdly quickly if you put it on a Vivi. Tools was the reward we had been looking for by slowing the game down with all of our postboard removal.

The night before deck submission, I didn't care about any of that -- I just cared that I was finally winning against red.

The List

Here's the list I ended up registering for the Pro Tour, going 7-3 in constructed. Our teammate Toni Portolan, who top 8ed, did a lot better than me in Limited, but had exactly the same constructed record with 74/75 cards, substituting the second Dissection Tools in the board for a Get Out, which was my final cut.

Main Deck

1 Thundering Falls

5 Island

4 Opt

4 Stormchaser's Talent

2 Monstrous Rage

3 Torch the Tower

3 Vivi Ornitier

4 Into the Flood Maw

3 Mountain

2 Wild Ride

1 Spell Pierce

4 Cori-Steel Cutter

4 Stock Up

4 Riverpyre Verge

4 Spirebluff Canal

4 Shivan Reef

4 Sleight of Hand

4 Monastery Swiftspear

Sideboard

1 Disdainful Stroke

2 Dissection Tools

2 Roaring Furnace // Steaming Sauna

1 Ghost Vacuum

3 Unable to Scream

2 Ral, Crackling Wit

1 Abrade

1 Soul-Guide Lantern

1 Spell Pierce

1 Negate

I'm not going to do a full card-by-card breakdown here. But I do want to talk about how the process above led to the choices this decklist is making.

Here's what I'd say is the "core" to any prowess deck, the cards almost no deck was cutting or should cut:

• 4 Cori-Steel Cutter

• 4 Stock Up

• 4 Sleight of Hand

• 4 Opt

• 3 "ragelikes" (Monstrous Rage / Wild Ride)

• 3 Into the Flood Maw

• 3 Shock effects (Torch the Tower/Burst Lightning)

• 20 untapped lands, including 4 each of Shivan Reef, Spirebluff Canal, and Riverpyre Verge

And then the choices my list made that were intentional/unique:

• 4 Monastery Swiftspears

• 4th Into the Flood Maw

• 4th Ragelike

• 3 Vivi Ornitier

• 1 Spell Pierce

• Thundering Falls as a 21st land

• 5/3 Island/Mountain split

The 4 Swiftspears were a concession to needing an advantage in the mirror. Not only is Swifty a way to easily develop prowess threats on board faster than your opponents who aren't playing them, it's deceptively hard to remove from the board. The opponent needs a well-timed Torch the Tower or to hope you run out of gas to make the Swifty a threatening attacker, and otherwise they're at the mercy of their own life total. We cut it in nearly every matchup postboard, and I was a hater of the card for Hartford, but in a post-Vivi, 42% prowess world, I think it was illegal to not put Swiftys in your deck if you wanted a meaningful edge in the mirror.

4th Into the Flood Maw was a consequence of us being high on Swiftspear and Vivi and low on all the 2-mana cards. You definitely want 4 bounce effects, possibly 5, and while TTABE is a card lots of prowess lists were playing, it synergizes with cards we ultimately concluded were too clunky in the mirror - Roaring Furnace//Steaming Sauna and Thundertrap Trainer - while being quite clunky itself (I really cannot stress enough how much more 2 mana is than 1 mana - TTABE doesn't really occupy the same slot as Floodmaw, it's a separate flex slot tool).

The 4th Ragelike, this time specifically Monstrous Rage, was mostly just due to an acknowledgement of how powerful the (now-banned) card is. I really wanted to play 2 Wild Rides because of how much they helped the Vivis be backbreaking threats, but the card Monstrous Rage was just too strong to not have access to when you wanted it. Playing 2 of a card in a deck with this much selection is kind of like playing 4 of it in a normal deck, and I liked feeling like I had ready access to both of these effects.

3 Vivis was another change made last minute, once we figured out the Dissection Tools plan against red. We were on 2 main/1 side for a while because we thought the card solved so many of the deck's problems against the "other" category, but we were hesitant to put ourselves in the position of drawing 2 against the two projected most popular decks, Red and the Mirror (it turned out Omni was represented almost twice as much as red, which was a pleasant surprise to us). Once we figured out Vivi was actually plan A against red, and we needed more sideboard slots to fit the double Dissection Tools, the 3rd Vivi moved to the main. We still preferred not to draw two in the mirror, but drawing 1 was surprisingly acceptable and could really help you "break serve". Practically everywhere else, Vivi dominated. I'm pretty optimistic/fearful about its role in post-band standard.

1 Spell Pierce was the only true "flex slot" in this version of the deck. Pierce had continued to be very impressive for me in testing, especially in the mirror. It's quite bad against red, but pretty great everywhere else, including against Omni, the other matchup I cared a lot about. This was mostly a vibes choice for me, and funnily enough, during the tournament I concluded that this was the card to board out in the mirror despite it being quite solid, because I wanted all my cards to be as proactive and "always-on" as possible. Especially against most of the lists people showed up with that included Drake Hatchers, I just never wanted to be punished for leaving up pierce on turn 2. This ended up playing out very well for me (I went 4-2 in mirrors), but I think pierce is totally defensible as a maindeck card (or a sideboard card against decks like Omni, UW control, and Domain). Plus, having 2 in the 75 is nice because it forces your opponent to decide on whether to respect them even when you don't have them in.

Thundering Falls is a card I went back and forth on during testing, but I was on 21 lands nearly the entire time. Paul liked saying that this deck wants about 20.6 lands, and I tend to agree. While having a tapland can sometimes be a huge detriment, getting an extra free "opt" can be equally crucial for not flooding in some games (or for keeping 1-landers, which also helps you not flood!), and the added fixing really helps you not die to your own Shivan Reefs sometimes. I was happy with the Falls, but it was a tentative happiness.

Lastly, the 5/3 basic split is pretty simple: This deck is running both Swiftspears and Wild Rides, and often needs to double-spell with red mana. I played a 6/2 split in Hartford with 0 Swiftys, but I'm, pretty sure 5/3 is better for this version of the deck.

Sideboarding & the Two Plans

Since we no longer live in the same Standard, this section won't be a sideboard guide (but my mapping is at the end for anyone who's curious!). Instead, I want to talk about the general philosophy of sideboarding here because it's got a very beautiful structure from a theory point of view.

Prowess was so defining of the PT standard metagame that every deck had a very intentional positioning against it, especially postboard. They either tried to turn off the card Cori-Steel Cutter with hate pieces, or they tried to be so aggressive (either with damage or a combo) that you couldn't race them with your monks.

As such, our prowess list had essentially only two different sideboard plans: the removal plan and the alternate threats + permission plan.

The removal plan looked roughly like this:

Out:

• 4 Swiftspears

• 1 Spell Pierce

• 0-2 Ragelikes

In:

• 2 Furnace/Sauna

• 3 Unable to Scream

• 0-2 Abrade/Ghost Vacuum

The threats + permission plan looked like this:

Out:

• 4 Swiftspears

• 3 Torch the Tower

• 0-2 Ragelikes

In:

• 2 Ral, Crackling Wit

• 1 Disdainful Stroke

• 1 Negate

• 1 Spell Pierce

• 2 Furnace/Sauna

• 0-2 Ghost Vacuum/Soul-Guide Lantern if Omni/other graveyard deck

There are of course variations by matchup, but one of these two plans is the main thing going on every time you sideboard. As long as you recognize which plan you should be on, you can adjust this sideboard to implement that plan with slightly different effects for any matchup you want to beat.

You'll notice that there's something very interesting going on that stays constant between both of these plans: we're bringing out 4 Swiftspears and bringing in 2 Furnace/Saunas. If we're doing this almost every time we sideboard, why not just change the maindeck?

The obvious answer is the mirror, but there's something else going on here too. Furnace/Sauna, on its face, seems like a maindeck card. It plays multiple roles that are good in different situations, but it does both slightly inefficiently. That's normally a property that shines in the maindeck but is insufficiently powerful for a sideboard slot.

We considered playing Furnace/Saunas main, and some teammates even did, because the card fills multiple of prowess's largest holes: Killing Large Creatures, and Avoiding Flood. However, the card was dead too many times for me to be comfortable putting it in the main.

What I realized on the last day as we were struggling to find sideboard space for the Dissection Tools plan is that Furnace/Sauna feels bad in the maindeck because it's incoherent with Swiftspears. Swifty is a card that incentivizes you to deploy most of your hand into board presence/damage, which leaves the Furnaces on top of your deck very sad. Postboard, when we're cutting Swiftspears in almost every matchup, Furnace/Sauna gets to play that "flexible maindeck card" role of killing Magebane Lizards, Bezas, and Zurs, while mitigating flood and giving us another strong alternate threat against decks that can't kill us quickly.

Here's the mapping I used, loosely, in the tournament:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hcGHlqzdViEpQZSzHZKHb8N2QFsEuJ-EuU3OlIvbNRk/edit?gid=0#gid=0

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Infinity Ways to be Wrong

Professional Magic continues to blow me away with the ways it can challenge me. Though I think I was playing prowess at a relatively high level in Hartford, I still find it breathtaking how wrong I was about so many things at the time, and how much was still left to learn about the deck from better players like Paul and cft.

There are always new ways to be right in Magic, but these are easily dwarfed by the uncountably infinite ways there are to be wrong.

No matter how smart, how experienced, how confident you are, you will feel stupid if you're doing things right when it comes to preparing for Magic tournaments.

I've come to rely on this feeling during Pro Tour prep. It's my little pilot light letting me know I'm on the right track, that I'm figuring things out that other competitors might not, or at least growing as a player enough to keep pace with everyone around me.

If there were one piece of advice I could give to players preparing for their first PT, it would be to try and give yourself the feeling of learning that you're wrong as often as possible. The answers are found in the negative space -- they are what's left after all the mistakes have been made.

What's Next?

Well, that's that I guess. I can stop ranting about how the deck with a 50% winrate is turbo broken and needs to go. In fact, I can probably stop talking about standard altogether, since the next PT is modern (gulp).

As weird as it is to say after complaining that cutter was broken for months on end, I'm going to miss this standard a lot. It got a bit absurd at the end, but I've been on rewarding journeys with so many of these cards. Otters put TTABE on the map before it became a format-defining force. Gruul Mice turned what was merely the strongest aggro core we've seen in a long time into an impossible-to-outmaneuver midrange-aggro beast. That is, before Nicole's Hopeless Nightmare shenanigans forced me to return to Mono Red, an incredible meta call at the Gruul-Pixie-Domain Pro Tour.

Then Cutter was released and everything went haywire (yes, even the mites). Before it caused the largest set of standard bans we've seen in a long, long time, it forced me to learn how to pilot the best deck better than most of the room, something that tested very clear weaknesses of mine as a player.

This is the first standard format I've played in its entirety since I was 17 battling with Courser of Kruphix, Hero's Downfall, and Elspeth, Sun's Champion. Magic sure is a lot different now - or maybe I'm just different, it's hard to say.

The biggest takeaway I have from my first successful constructed format is that if limited is about engineering consistent power, constructed is about engineering flexible power. The best constructed decks do a very strong, hard-to-answer thing at their core (usually something that wins convincingly on one axis), and then punish people who try to fight them on that axis by deftly pivoting to another one.

• This was true for Otters, which won on the mana axis with explosive Enduring Curiosity development, but pivoted to winning on the spells axis with intricate ways to protect its key pieces while interacting to produce card advantage, or the life total axis with surprise floodcaller damage explosions.

• It was true for Gruul, which won on the life total axis with fast aggro starts, but pivoted to winning on the spells axis with Questing Druid and Emberheart Challenger if the opponent sold out to stop the aggro.

• Okay, less true for Mono Red, a deck that mainly was positioned to win on the life total axis with chip damage + burn against decks that were prepared for Gruul's resiliency but relying on Gruul's slightly under-optimized speed

• It was definitely true for Prowess, who was better than them all at winning on the damage axis with fast cutter starts, but could easily pivot to winning on mana with an unchecked Vivi, or spells with Talent + Stock Up being better and leaner than the other card engines in the format.

Whatever succeeds in the new standard, I expect it to be focused on a powerful synergy engine, with strong "plan B"s that shore up (or stock up, as it were) the deck's traditional weaknesses. So far it's looking like Dimir Mid is the leader out of the gates, but I'm expecting there to be a lot of innovation that comes along to exploit the weaknesses of an unfocused midrange deck (there's a reason that the best dimir pilots insist the deck is supposed to be played like aggro-tempo!).

As for me, I'm making a few changes to the Patreon, starting to learn Modern, and wlll also be trying to get my groove back in limited.

But I won't be taking my attention too far off of standard either, because part of the point of learning modern is that I intend to make it to Worlds.

And if I'm playing at Worlds, I intend to win it.