Jeskai Deck's Mid: A (late) PT ECL Deck Reflection

Intro

Format 0->60

WTF is Gwinko?

(Over)tuning For the Tournament

What Did we Learn?

Intro

It's taken me a while to figure out how I want to write about my constructed process for PT Lorwyn. So long that an entire new set has come out and the standard format we were preparing for is pretty much dead! So this isn't exactly going to be a deck guide, but I did learn a lot from this PT, as I do from every PT, and I wanted to process and share those learnings even if it's not the kind of content that helps people prepare for a specific tournament or gives them a deck to try on ladder.

Here's the deck I registered for the PT:

Was it a good choice? I went 6-4 with it, and in a lot of rounds felt like I was very well positioned. But it's hard to say it was a good choice, given that we had a significant cohort crushing with the Temur Harmonizer deck, including Toni who eventually made the finals. The rest of our Jeskai players also did worse than I did, which matches my perception that I got quite lucky to go 4-0 after losing the first round of constructed on day 1. This piece isn't going to be focused on the mistakes I made in deck selection (I did make them, and talked about them here). To summarize:

One of my takeaways from Worlds was that I'd lingered too long on deck selection and failed to give myself enough time for matchup planning

The Jeskai Deck we were working on seemed robustly powerful and able to be adapted to almost any metagame

I committed to it about a week and a half before deck submission and failed to play more than a few ladder sets with the Harmonizer deck, not even getting expert gameplay help before dismissing it.

Today, we're going to be focusing on the entire process I went through with this deck. There were some good choices, some bad ones, and some unclear ones. Overall, my assessment is that this was an extremely middling choice for a PT, and I can do better -- but that being said, it's also very easy to make a terrible deck choice for any PT, and I'm pretty glad I didn't do that.

Format 0->60

The turnaround from Worlds to PT Lorwyn was about a month and a half, and in the middle of that were holidays with my family. Cards from Lorywn weren't even being spoiled until the first week of January, so I chose to take a few weeks off from even thinking about standard until spoilers started, partially to get a hard reset from all the impressions we'd gotten during Worlds prep. When I returned, I spent about a week playing a ton of ladder matches to try and get a broad sense of the format. This resulted in a large infodump in the discord about two weeks out from the tournament:

Okay — Since we don’t have cft to dump a thesis on us, here are my thoughts about standard after a few days of playing a ton on ladder just to gather data/feed my intuition and get a sense for most of the decks, strengths and weaknesses, etc:

I see three current “top decks” (more like spaces) that each have different strengths and weaknesses: Lessons, Badgermole, and Jeskai. All 3 of these decks I believe deserve their spots at the top and with good piloting would be a good choice for any tournament right now, so I am still actively considering all of them, with a meaningful lean towards jeskai because I believe it's the choice with the most ability to generate information advantage.

Lessons

Lessons is the easiest to talk about since it’s very hard to deviate too much from stock, there are only a certain number of flex slots. I see lessons as a very powerful “blue small” deck that has a combo finish instead of the traditional prowess finish (overall a pretty meaningful archetype-level improvement).

Lessons’ strengths are that it is quite punishing to decks that rely on 2-toughness creatures or single large creatures because of its interaction suite, it can deploy its engine very nimbly, its engine is costly (in a deckbuilding sense) to interact with, and it can fight through low levels of hate pretty effectively. Another strength is that it’s easy to play at a medium level and very hard to play at a high level.

These are some very good strengths — decks that rely on small creatures or single big creatures surviving is a super large range of magic decks, and the fastest decks almost always have this property. Being able to deploy engine very nimbly compliments this tremendously, because this is usually the best way to fight against slower decks that your interaction won’t line up as well against. Finally, lessons both asks you to pack hate, and requires you to spread that hate out across basically the 3 traditional sideboard effects: artifact hate, enchantment hate, and graveyard hate. If you have to pick only one, you should probably pick artifact hate, then enchantment hate, then graveyard hate, but meaningful amounts of all 3 is better than overloading on one IMO.

All this means it’s quite difficult to build a deck with a massively favorable lessons matchup. You need good pressure that doesn’t rely on a “killable” number of creatures, and you need lots of interaction that actually works against them, preferably on all 3 dimensions of their engine. The fact that it’s easy to believe you have a good lessons matchup because of the skill gap between competent and expert players makes it a lot easier to believe you’ve done this when you haven’t.

However, I do believe this is possible to do, and the main weakness of lessons to me is that it doesn’t have a lot of moves if a deck comes actually prepared instead of cope-prepared. It does one very powerful, very hard-to-disrupt thing, but at the end of the day, it is possible to have a good plan, and I think it’s very hard for lessons to meaningfully transform itself into something that isn’t weak to a good plan.

Basically, Lessons is a target that’s small and far away and hard to hit, but it also can’t really move very much, so if you figure out how to shoot at it effectively, you can expect to hit.

Badgermole

Badgermole encompasses both Simic Ouro and Landfall. Another good name for this would be “green engine decks”.

Simic Ouro’s* strengths are that it has some of the fastest starts in the format if not interacted with, and generally closes the door quickly if left unchecked at any point in the game. It’s also able to overwhelm traditional 1-for-1 removal based interaction suites. Specifically Lessons is very good at killing the first 2-3 creatures that matter, but will consistently struggle to kill the 4th, 5th, 6th etc, and because of the card flow provided by Quantum Riddler, Nature’s Rhythm, flex threats like Enduring/Surrak/Vivien (and lowkey Badgermole Cub providing 2 bodies), Badgermole decks almost never fully run out of gas. They will just keep rebuilding the same engine over and over and over. *

It’s easy to look at your deck, see a bunch of interaction that can disassemble Simic’s engine, and conclude you have a good matchup, but I think it’s very important in practice to be able to disassemble the engine multiple times, and have good closing speed so they can’t assemble it a third time. It’s also very important to be able to disassemble the first presentation quickly because of how fast the starts can be — even the most interactive decks will sometimes die on the draw with wraths in hand if they can’t torch the first elf.

The main weakness of badgermole decks is that they can never interact with you that much, and they are interactable with on a single axis. This means two things. First, if you can truly interact with their creatures early and consistently throughout a game, it is very possible to not die and give yourself a lot of time to do something powerful that goes over the top of just a couple of dorks and a riddler or two. Second, if you do something powerful at any stage of the game, they’re very likely not going to be able to answer it - so if you can figure out how to goldfish faster or slow them down enough to get to whatever you want to do, they’re pretty unlikely to be able to stop you. (the thing you want to do should ideally not be cold to a single Spider Sense or small amounts of artifact/enchantment/graveyard hate, because simic decks currently need to use their limited interaction slots to turn the lessons matchup positive)

Landfall* is similar to simic in that it is a green deck that builds an engine that is resilient to interaction, so I won’t talk about it too much. The case Landfall makes is that it much better dodges creature removal than Simic, in that its “combo” (harmonizer mainly) can be deployed hastily from hand without as much setup, it can build its resources through putting lands and enchantments into play instead of dorks, and Ba Sing Se and Earthbender’s Ascension close games while shrugging off removal. This makes it structurally better positioned against lessons than Simic. *

Landfall’s main weakness is being meaningfully slower than Simic to set up its engine and kill. It often needs to resolve a 3-drop (Earthbender’s/Worldwagon) or a 4-drop (Icetill/flashback Esper Origins) and untap after that to really get going, and it’s playing many fewer early dorks to accelerate it into this. Torching the llanowar elf is usually extremely good against landfall for this reason, it is a true time walk more or less. Landfall also cannot play an extensive interaction suite, so it has that same structural weakness as simic, in that if you do a powerful thing against them you’ll almost always be allowed to do it.

Overall, landfall in some sense has the best proactive endgame in the format, so it’s worth respecting, and if there’s some way to make the deck faster (or more able to bridge towards its endgame with interaction, kinda like Jesse’s Icetill decks for Worlds) I think this would be a really interesting space to explore.

Jeskai

Finally, Jeskai, which consists of one known traditional control deck, and two known-externally but probably-not-respected-enough “alt” versions (Recording and Gwinko).

Jeskai’s thesis is that because the format consists of a bunch of meaningfully-linear engine decks, if you really commit to a highly interactive plan, you can be very well positioned to successfully disassemble almost everything. The suite of Lightning Helix, Get Lost, No More Lies, Day of Judgment, Ultima, Three Steps Ahead, Seam Rip/Torch, and now Spell Snare covers a lot, and there are also some very strong conditional tools like Pyroclasm, Annul, Abrade, and Negate, and some very effective sideboard cards like Voice of Victory, Rest in Peace, Torpor Orb, High Noon, Beza, and Unagi of Kyoshi Island. Basically, there are just the tools to beat/interact with/turn off anything you want to in the Jeskai space, and the more generalized tools are very effective at buying you time to use the blue card advantage (stock up/consult/Kuruk) to have very high selection towards the effective hate tools.

Jeskai’s weakness is ending games effectively. With so much deck space needing to be allotted to interaction (you need enough density of the generic tools to have access to them consistently early, enough slots to fit all the targeted tools for all the different engines, and enough card advantage to expect to consistently be able to hit land drops and find more gas), it’s very hard to find enough room to actually be able to fit enough stuff to end games in a convincing way.

Stock Jeskai says “eh it’ll probably be fine if I get to cast a few powerful finishers” (Jeskai Rev, Marang, Wan Shi Tong, Unagi). I think we all agree this is a bad plan from a theory perspective— but the fact that it is still a quite effective plan in the current format I think should really tell us a lot, mainly that the interactive plan is strong enough to carry games mostly on its own*. *

Recording* says “1-2 copies of Cursed recording is the most compact package for ending games convincingly”, and I think this is correct—Copying Jeskai Rev with Recording really does end games in a much more meaningful way than just casting a single Rev. Recording the card is clunky, but it works very well with all the other interaction and card advantage in the deck and is super compact from a deckbuilding standpoint. It lets you focus fully on the interaction plan and also expect to actually end games when you end them. *

The main weakness of Recording is that it is punishable in the same way as traditional control is punishable — Resilient threats and nimble gameplay can often cause big problems for it, because its cards are so expensive and it needs to keep hitting land drops and finding the right interaction, while only casting ~1.3 spells a turn.

Gwinko* says “I want to do the work of ending the game ahead of time by putting board presence into play and reducing my opponent’s life total while I interact with them”. Generally this makes Gwinko a lot harder to exploit because it gets to play cheaper cards and pressure on multiple axes at the same time (cards, life total, and mana utilization). *

I can’t speak to the effectiveness of this plan in the current format as it exists as much, but I intend to test more with it in the coming days, because I think from a theory perspective it has very meaningful advantages over the more brittle properties of the other control shells. In control mirrors it gets to present threats (a very powerful thing in modern control mirrors because you get recurring value in the form of life total changes for every turn that goes by with threats in play, much like planeswalkers in 2010s control mirrors) while still having all the same card advantage tools and ability to hit land drops/play into the long game. Against lessons, you get to pressure them in ways that their removal suite can’t handle which takes away their ability to be patient and deploy their engine nimbly in long games, which makes your interaction for their engine much more effective. Against green decks is where I’m least confident the theory holds, because these decks are putting board presence into play while they build, and I think it’s TBD (for me personally) whether you can effectively set up for ending the game in the same way against them — and whether the cards you’re putting in your deck to have board presence more often make it harder to continue to interact with their waves and waves of presenting engine.

The main weaknesses of Gwinko are hinted at above — it’s not clear to me yet how punishing sacrificing some of the permission parts of the interaction plan is, but it’s feasible that it’s really punishing in the current format, and the only interactive plans that work super effectively against the wide range of engines are the ones that can select certain spells to exclude from the game in a way that covers/fills the gaps of whatever answers they weren’t able to find.

————

Going to quickly address the ‘other’ decks:

Dimir* says that it can go under the Ouro decks by interacting profitably with their dorks in the early turns, can punish the interactive decks with Kaito and Curiosity, and… [lessons plan needed beyond hoping to land Kaito]. Generally I think Dimir needs things to go quite perfectly in the development turns and is very bad at coming back from behind. *

Sultai Reanimator* says it can punish Lessons by ignoring its interaction suite, punish the green decks by wiping the board and presenting lethal in the same turn cycle, and punish control decks with cavern of souls and OTKs like Terror of the Peaks. It also claims it can fight through graveyard hate postboard with tools like Awaken the Honored Dead and Intimidation Tactics. The problem is that it’s slow and inconsistent and can’t actually beat graveyard hate. *

Mono Red and Boros Aggro* claim they can beat Lessons by having lots of threats that gain damage equity through 1-for-1 removal and having the card Magebane Lizard, can beat Ouro by having removal for its dorks and killing it while it tries to rebuild its engine, and can beat control and other decks by just being a good proactive aggro deck. I actually believe the first two claims but strongly disbelieve the third, the red cards just aren’t good enough to make a fast, resilient aggro deck. Cast a lightning helix, a Beza, and a counterspell, and they roll over way too easily. Cast some random creatures/Seam rips, an Esper Origins and an Icetill Explorer, and same story. *

Izzet Looting* claims it’s a better blue small deck than Izzet Lessons because it is more proactive and also doesn’t run out of cards in the same way, and I think this is somewhat accurate, but the issue is that it’s not really very blue small because it can’t fit very much good interaction in, and this means it loses to the green engine decks, while not being fast or resilient enough to beat the control decks. *

Airbending* claims it has a strong combo that races the green engine decks by goldfishing (I believe this), beats lessons and control by being able to be very patient with its setup and deploy its pieces whenever it wants, and beats other decks by being a powerful proactive combo deck. I don’t strongly disbelieve any of this but I think there are some very big weaknesses here, namely consistency and being much worse against strong players playing carefully (roughly, airbending often has a lot of moves based on hidden information, but if you completely think through all the moves they could make, it is often still possible to play around all of them).*

This was basically my view of the format going into RC Portland, and I think it was mostly pretty accurate. Lessons was the top dog at the time, Cub and Landfall were known but underestimated, Jeskai was known to be bad.

People came into the RC extremely prepared for Lessons while underrating cub decks of all sorts - Nature's Rhythm variants, Landfall, and Airbending. Meanwhile, the only "control" archetype to do well as a whole was "Gwinko", the archetype that I was planning to submit for the PT in just a few days, which had just put 2/2 of its pilots through to the Pro Tour.

Okay, I should probably address this...

WTF is "Gwinko"?

Gwinko (a portmanteau of "Gwen Stacy" and "Shiko", where the headlining interaction is that you can flash back the 5-mana version of Gwen with a Shiko) is the deck that Jennifer-Rose Holloway brought to Worlds and placed 34th with, and the deck I had been very close to switching to right before the event. It's not strictly a control deck, because its main gameplan is to play strong creatures and pressure the opponent's life total with them, but it's not strictly a midrange deck, because it plays Stock Ups and Wraths.

On first glance, this deck looks pretty incoherent. If you're using your Aang on turn 3 to delay their progress in the game, part of the value of that card is that it's a threat that applies pressure - what happens to that pressure when you have to wrath away the board in a few turns? On the other hand, what happens when you're trying to compete into the lategame with another control deck whose threats go higher "over the top" and you draw your Shikos and Gwens? What happens when you Stock Up, hoping to find relevant removal or a sweeper, and instead find a Gwen and an Aang?

This deck was masterminded into existence by Talia Bael, one of Sanctum's OG control theorists, and despite it kind of looking like a generically strong but unfocused pile an inexperienced control player might take to FNM, there are some subtle theoretical reasons why the deck functions much better than it scans.

The best way I can put it is that this is a deck that's exceedingly good at forcing the opponent to play fair games of Magic, and then having the card quality to dominate those fair games.

It looks incoherent to play a wrath deck with so many creatures, but the core idea of this deck is that you're still playing a traditional control deck, except you substitute threats for permission.

If you compare this decklist to a traditional Jeskai Control deck, it has roughly the same amount of card advantage (4 Stock Up, 4 Legend of Kuruk, 3 Shiko to flash back Stock Ups). It also has the same amount of removal and Wraths: 3 Get Lost, 4 Lightning Helix, 1 Essence Scatter, 4 DOJ/Ultima, 1 Pyroclasm, 1 Aang's Iceberg. The difference is that instead of playing cards like Three Steps Ahead, No More Lies (okay, Jen's list does play 3, but leading up to the PT we were confident in 0), and clunky finishers like Jeskai Revelation and Marang, we play efficient, clock-producing creatures like Aang, Shiko, and the backside of Legend of Kuruk.

Traditional control tries to answer everything the opponent does -- removal for the biggest threats, wraths to clean up everything that gets "under" the wraths, and permission to fill the gaps / close games in deterministic ways. Gwinko's plan is that instead of using permission to fill the gaps, it leans on dynamic threats to create pressure and force the opponent into suboptimal decisions. As Talia puts it, "the way wraths work in the deck is that our creature suite is heavily structured to pressure opponents into committing more to boards than us pre-wrath". It's not that we want to wrath away our Shiko -- it's that Shiko's sizing as a threat outclasses most "fair" boards, so the opponent has to put more resources into building something "unfair" to overcome our single threat which also produced value when it came down, at which point we're happy to wrath and start over with an advantage.

This plan also happens to turn the 4 Lightning Helixes into the best card in the deck - when your opponent cares about their own life total as well as pressuring yours and sticking relevant threats, a well-timed Helix swings so many games. Gwinko's proactivity also makes the traditional control plan of siding in large numbers of Voice of Victory way more effective, because the Voices become naturally "on plan" rather than "a plan on their own".

In control mirrors, I think many, many people would be surprised to learn how much nimble, hard-to-cleanly-answer threats outclass even permission-and-finisher lategames. This deck has the card advantage to hit its land drops with the best control mages, and although you have dead wraths in game 1, so do they -- Ultima is not a very good answer to Aang, Shiko, or Kuruk. We felt like control mirrors were our best matchup, and I continue to feel this way about control decks structured like this. It's 2026, and being the beatdown in a control mirror is actually good.

(Over)tuning for the Tournament

That being said, there weren't no concerns heading into the PT, despite the truly incredible success of Sanctum Gwinko pilots at the RC.

If Gwinko has a big weakness, it's resilient engine decks - snowballing decks that are good at repeatedly presenting their engine in waves and waves and don't really fold or fizzle, even against pseudo-infinite interaction. Landfall is a classic example of this, and was well understood to be our worst matchup heading into the tournament, to the extent that our plan was mostly to be punting it and hoping to steal games where they stumbled and we could slow them down enough with our interaction and close with fast flying pressure.

The other big concern was that the Cub decks, specifically the Rhythm decks, might secretly be similarly resilient to interaction when piloted by strong players - despite their surface-level weakness to wraths, they were just incredibly good at "re-presenting" waves and waves of pressure even though wraths and removal if the pilot played carefully and didn't overcommit:

Simic wasn't as good at powering through disruption as landfall, to be sure. Killing Cubs and wrathing large boards still tended to set them behind a full turn cycle or even two, but the issue was that with Quantum Riddlers to help them refuel and Nature's Rhythm sitting in yard being a constant Craterhoof threat if they ever put enough mana into play, you just could never fully stabilize -- and focusing so much on disrupting them often didn't leave you with enough action to close quickly, so they could keep coming back into the game. Trying to play the control game against Simic was like this meme:

While you were "dusting off your hands" (waiting to draw some action that would be good enough to close the game), they would come right back into it and you'd have to use your newfound resources to set them back again instead of closing. Simic won this dance more often than Jeskai did, which was a problem.

This is not to say the matchup was bad. The badgermole deck was inconsistent enough that it did get fizzled sometimes, and they usually had no way to deal with a flying clock once you established it. But the matchup wasn't actively good, and after an RC where Cub/Rhythm decks were the talk of the town, we didn't feel great about that if we were to bring Gwinko to the PT.

Thinking more about the play patterns of the matchup, we started to realize that the wraths, which were only really there for the cub decks... might not even be that good against them? If that was the case, why were we playing them in the first place, beyond the theory of the deck?

Enter... Gwinko Eclipsed (as Jason started calling it), or Jeskai Deck Wins (as I started calling it), the version of the deck that we played at the PT. The major changes are cutting the wraths and Kuruks from the maindeck or Voice of Victory and Enduring Curiosity:

Oddly, as a solution to the Cub matchup, we didn't think we'd gained dramatically, but we felt like the new plan was both more coherent and set us up far better to focus on crushing the other decks we expected, like Lessons. Basically, we took the Simic deck having inevitability seriously, and instead of trying to control them for the entire game by casting multiple wraths, we forced them to kill us fast through our early interaction, and threatened to close games decisively if they didn't. We were the interactive beatdown. Enduring Curiosity was much better (compared to Kuruk) at both putting their life total under pressure quickly and letting us leave up Aangs/Get Losts to fight Nature's Rhythm/Ouroboroid, and Voice of Victory was admittedly still our worst card in the matchup by a good margin, but a clock's a clock when all your other cards are disruptive. Postboard, we still get to cut them for some wraths and an extra pyroclasm, which lets us play the "forking" gameplan of pressuring them while punishing them for overextending into wraths without going all-in on the wraths and trying to play the control role.

The main upside of this new build was that it let us be playing the maindeck we wanted to be playing into the rest of the format, especially Airbending and Lessons:

Unfortunately, I was very wrong about my Lessons prediction - in fact, it seems like lots of players pivoted off of it because they got spooked by the RC results. I was insisting to the pilots on our team that lessons was going to be a good choice for this PT because there was no longer a big target on its back, but I think I next-leveled myself thinking other people would figure this out. It did have a strong winrate at the PT, but sadly that doesn't matter much if you're banking on one of your best matchups being one of the top-played decks.

I don't think notes got captured for the airbending sets, but this was the other hot deck going into the PT, and the reason we liked the new build better is that the wraths aren't nimble enough against them. The main thing you want to do is play a fair flash game, holding up mana on their turn and 1-for-1ing them with your removal without ever having to go shields-down or needing to play removal into their value threats (Aang/Appa). Postboard, we had started to put Doorkeeper Thrulls in our board to play double duty forcing both Airbending and Living End into fair games, and a few Elspeths (1 main/1 side) to decisively win those fair games. Living End was the matchup we were most concerned about going into the PT (outside of landfall), so it was beneficial that this compact sideboard package let us cover two important matchups:

(More generally, the Elspeth/Thrull also provided coverage against the Elementals decks that had just started popping up, and turned out to be quite popular at the tournament. They just felt well positioned at the time, and I think this was a good read).

This major re-tuning was all happening in the final few days before the tournament. Literally, day 2 of RC on Sunday was dominated by Rhythm and Airbending decks, we started theorizing how to react to this that night, did some extensive testing on Monday, tried to verify results and make sure we hadn't accidentally made other matchups worse on Tuesday, and decklists were due Wednesday at noon, but as usual we submitted on Tuesday night before bed, because last-minute changes can be overly reactive and poorly thought-through (more on this later...)

At the PT, things started out badly, losing the first round of constructed to Simic Rhythm after a disappointing 1-2 in draft. However, I was able to rattle off 4 wins from there, beating...

Another Simic Rhythm deck

Jim Davis on Esper Pixie (a luckily incredible matchup from the "other" category)

Thierry Ramboa on Cosmos's Izzet Prowess deck that has since become a tier 1 deck in standard (the matchup felt good but I also think I got quite lucky to win topdecking a lightning helix at the perfect time and still dodging multiple live topdecks, so who knows)

Another Bant Rhythm deck (who kept a 1-lander in game 1 and a hand that folded to pyroclasm in game 2)

Then in day 2, I was able to pull out a 2-1 in draft with a deck that easily could have 3-0ed (but 3-0s are almost never more likely than 2-1s), and faced:

Simon Nielsen on Handshake's 5-color rhythm deck, where I punted game 1 pretty badly, forgetting to count Simon's mana and declining to leave up an Aang for a Rhythm before he hoofed me

Another bant rhythm gamer (the other Puglisi Clark, brother of my last round opponent the previous day!), who I beat to lock up enough AMPs to qualify for Amsterdam later this year

Masahide Moriyama on Izzet Burn, a very interesting deck that felt like a very good matchup, but he was able to sneak through a win with double Sunspine Lynx in game 3

Sam Clayton on Sultai Reanimator, a particularly lovely opponent (though all were great!) who crushed me and my weak draws in a bad matchup

Ivan Espinosa, the third Bant Rhythm gamer I'd faced from team scrapheap, on a very similar list to the Puglisi Clark brothers, who I was able to beat with some well-timed Aangs, pyroclasms and wraths.

Overall I went 4-2 against cub decks (including punting against Simon, which is one of the most punishing decisions I've ever made in a PT match and I hope to learn from -- always do the math!!!), and 2-2 against "other", never facing Airbending or Lessons. This is not a bad constructed result, but it is my worst one ever at a PT! (not counting 1-3 at Worlds or 5-3 at the previous Worlds, I've gone 7-3 in constructed at every PT). Ultimately, I felt like I was playing a pretty middling standard deck, and got somewhat lucky to come out with a positive record, despite piloting it well and earning my wins.

What Did We Learn?

I don't think the changes we made to the deck during the final few days were poorly thought-through, but I do unfortunately think they were overly reactive. We ended up pushing the deck too far in a non-flexible direction. Even though we had correctly identified that we wanted to play a tempo-oriented midrange plan against most of the format as it existed going into the tournament, we forgot that our deck had structural needs too - one of the main ones being selection in a deck full of situational cards that wanted to implement a flexible reactive gameplan. Before becoming convinced by a few testing sets against key matchups in the final days before deck reg, I had been expressing concerns about the switch from Kuruk to Curiosity:

Looking back, with perfect hindsight, I think these concerns were valid and I should have listened to them. The strength of Gwinko was that it was a dynamic control deck that could switch roles unpredictably throughout a game and turn corners quickly. Even though the wraths weren't specifically "good" against any one deck in the format, they added a hard-to-play-against dimension to the deck that, when removed, meant you were just playing a relatively normal midrange deck that struggled to come back from losing positions. And Curiosity, despite being incredible with Voice of Victory, was meaningfully not the same in the "card advantage slot" as Legend of Kuruk. Drawing 3 cards off of Curiosity was often worse than the 2 cards with massive selection that Kuruk provided, because you were often in positions where you were digging to one specific category of effect, and mostly what mattered was "did you find it?", not "how many resources did you pull ahead by?".

The rise of Landfall and decks like Dimir Excruciator (a control deck with better corner-turning ability than us, which potentially flips the pseudo-mirror dynamics, though I haven't tested this extensively) has meant that "Traditional Gwinko", while still being a totally reasonable deck, isn't as well-positioned today as it was in January. The deck also hasn't gained much from either Lorwyn or TMNT, although as Sophi demonstrated at the RC, Ashling Rekindled into Kuruk is a pretty nasty curve, and is how I'd build the deck now. In fact, Jason, Sophi and others have been developing the Ashling plan further, including a splash for Inevitable Defeat meant to help fight Landfall as well as generically being lightning helix + get lost, the other main interaction pieces we were already playing, stapled together. You can check out that build here if you're interested!

I'm not really sure what to make of my process for this PT. I obviously should have given the Harmonizer deck more of a chance and trusted my teammates when they said it felt broken. That was a clear mistake I can learn from. I think I also should have trusted my own gut more when it came to making big, fundamental changes to the deck I'd been feeling good about based on only a few focused testing sets against the major matchups. It would have been very hard to trust myself over someone like Jason who was pretty convinced that Gwinko Eclipsed was a meaningful improvement over the version we had already been struggling with against the cub decks, especially after playing some convincing sets myself - but I do think my instincts were telling me something real about the costs of cutting Kuruk from the deck, and I should have better integrated the two competing pressures - possibly playing the Kuruk list, but trimming down to two wraths and still playing more of a proactive game into the cub decks (or mulliganing to pyroclasm hands more aggressively).

I also did a bad job of acting on metagame information I was being fed by players on our own team who had attended the RC switching off of lessons and onto cub decks mere days before the tournament. I let an incredibly good-vibes lessons set boost my confidence and continued to stick to my "lessons is going to be popular and a good choice" take, when I should have separated those two things and been less willing to feel good about how much the changes improved our positioning into lessons.

That said, these are all relatively nuanced and high-degree-of-difficulty-to-execute-in-hindsight takeaways, at least if you ignore "should have played the broken deck that we had in-house" one.

In terms of getting up to speed in a fast-moving format quickly, making an accurate assessment of what kinds of angles of attack would work, learning to play a difficult deck at a deep theoretical level, figuring out lots of matchup subtleties and ways to beat the most popular decks in the room, and coming up with a coherent (if ultimately equity-losing) pivot that did actually strengthen the deck's positioning into the top section of the metagame, all in less than three weeks? I honestly think we did a pretty good job, and I personally was operating at a level of constructed tournament prep that would have been unthinkable for me a year ago.

My general conclusion is that this PT was a failure in terms of constructed, but as failures go, it was quite a good one, and I learned a lot. (In terms of Limited, even though I personally went 3-3, I felt and still feel extremely good about how much our limited process has improved over the past few PTs, and it showed in the rest of the team's results).

I've been taking a bit of a break from playing serious amounts of standard, but I'm still tuned in enough to the format that I'm very excited to return to it once prep for PT Secrets of Strixhaven starts ramping up, and excited to both have a longer tail of prep time and more willingness to trust my own instincts and learn from more players around me than primarily Jason and Talia (both of whom, to be clear, have been absolutely instrumental in some of my biggest learning moments over the past year).

In the meantime, will be rooting for Sanctum folks and NYC Grind2Dust locals at the Spotlight this weekend and at the European RC! Magic rocks so much, and I'm content with being a spectator for now, but I'll be back in the arena soon.

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