The Night Before PT Amsterdam

"Play the Game, See the World", the marketing slogan said... so here I am at my first non-US (non-Chicago, Atlanta, Vegas, or Seattle) PT, in my third year. So far I've seen a lovely little dutch vacation village where a river flows through everyone's backyard (each with its own little dock attached!), and a house full of 10 amazing Sanctum teammates. Next week I'm going to be exploring the real Amsterdam (and Rotterdam and the Hague!) with one of my closest friends, Jonah. But tomorrow once again I get to compete with some of the best in the world at this game that I love so much it's brought me halfway around the world to this cramped hotel room, munching on a grocery store orange and trying to rest my brain instead of being out enjoying a beautiful, interesting city. Professional Magic sure is weird.

I don't know if I've said this before, but I always hate the "player parties" the night before the PT. Absolutely no hate at all to the WOTC people who organize these, they're a really nice gesture to make the Pro Tour feel like a special achievement, but they always just have this extremely awkward and nervous feeling for me. At my first worlds I expected this feeling of not belonging in that room was just first time nerves/jitters, but I still feel exactly the same way, I just want to get my badge and go back to my hotel room and distract myself with a book or a podcast and not have to talk to anyone until I sit down for the draft tomorrow.

This was made a little harder this time by the fact that I had to stay around to get interviewed by coverage as the team captain of Sanctum. This isn't the first PT where I've been qualified but Jason isn't, but it is the first one where Jason hasn't been present at the testing house and taking on a lot of the work of leading the team, and it's definitely felt deeply weird. (I don't mean to reify Jason specifically here though of course they are a huge part of it -- I'm using Jason as a stand-in for all the members of Sanctum veteran leadership that helped me become the player I am today -- Nicole, Claire, Nate, Etienne, etc.).

People have been making comments about this kind of thing all week. "Toni and cft have top 8ed this year, now it's your turn", "I drafted you in my fantasy draft", etc. While I obviously am tremendously grateful that people see me as a world-class player now, it's extremely weird and uncomfortable to have that kind of expectation put on you!! Pro Tours are extremely fucking hard and I could very easily go 0-5 and be off the PT by 2pm tomorrow. The entire philosophy that has gotten me to this point and that I've written so much about is about how I can succeed because I'm not the best, but I work the hardest, and I've tried to do that this time as well, even with the added logistics and emotional baggage of "leading the team", also while looking for a job in my regular life back in NY, but this stuff extremely practically does take a lot of work and I can't say that I've had as much time to focus just on the Magic as I used to when all I was doing was following the more experienced players' leads.

That being said, I do think I've done a really good job locking in with the time I've had to lock in, which is still far more than a player with a fulltime job or a family might have. I feel good about my constructed deck, and I lowkey feel kinda great about my limited process in this format, which started from a conversation that I had coming back from Vegas with Mora and Jason, encouraging me to lean more into nuance and the kinds of information that can be learnable through intuition but difficult to express succinctly when coming to opinions about limited. In other words, I've to some extent become too "content-brained" and lost a bit of my Limited Sicko-ness as I've tried to apply some of the more straightforward lessons I've learned in my journey in constructed back onto my drive to get better at Limited. It turns out Limited is just freaking better + harder than constructed, was all along, etc. I'm stoked to try really hard to draft + play beautifully at the highest level tomorrow, hopefully Saturday, and maybe even Sunday if everything breaks perfectly.

Oh, and in constructed, I came into this process hoping to trust my gut over "Sanctum hivemind" and play whatever I genuinely believed the best choice was, but as it turned out, my understanding of the matchup spreads and the strength of every option in modern lined up with the deck Jason had been "doing propaganda about without having actually played it much recently" from the beginning of the testing process: Chant Control.

But that didn't stop me from registering what I think is one of the cleanest and most Ryan-pilled sideboards I've ever registered for a tournament, at least since Quint Combo.

4/4/4/1/1/1. Just play the most high impact cards you can in each slot, and hopefully win the tournament this time instead of just getting 2nd.

See you on the other side.