The Night before PT Secrets of Strixhaven

I normally write that I'm super nervous in these "night before" posts. This is maybe the first time that nerves aren't the primary feeling I'm feeling. Does this make me uncomfortable? Of course. I want to want it more than anyone else.

But of course, I do want it. It's just natural to acclimate to the feeling of wanting it when you've been here (literally, here) before. It's wild that this is the third time I've been in Vegas for a Magic tournament. The smell of smoke in the casinos, the billboards promoting bougie restaurants, and me and my oversized backpack just like when I was taking the train an hour into the city to play FNM in high school.

I do still feel a bit like a kid, and I'm glad for that. But I'm not one anymore even on the PT, and nothing makes that fact more obvious than the amount of people I care so deeply about who have been involved in this process. Some people who I've known a long time, in many different contexts and stages of their life, and some who I just met & I have a feeling are going to be important to me for a long time.

I think I care more about the team doing well at this tournament than I care about doing well, and that's a weird feeling. Of course, there's some ego involved in this. I feel like a leader on Sanctum now. People at the testing house kept asking me things like I knew and I was in charge (this made sense for them to do, I was in fact one of the more experienced players on the team and had been leading a lot of things, this is impostor syndrome I'm describing).

It would be a bit weird to list them since I really do care about the entire team's results, but there are a few players this weekend who I'm rooting for just a little bit more in private because of how impressed I've been working with them and how much I want to see their attitude and drive and hearts succeed on the game's biggest stage. I'm legitimately going to be happier if some of these players do well than if I do. What the fuck, dude. I'm washed.

Anyways, in the hopes that I'm not washed, I tried to dig deep into my gut this time in the testing process. Sanctum has been hard at work crafting an incredibly exciting deck that I think has a real shot to break the format this weekend. For various reasons, I didn't end up believing in this deck enough to get the amount of reps I'd have needed to be comfortable registering the final version, which went through some major final-few-days changes that we think may have taken it from "good, but good enough?" to "great". Maybe. Fingers crossed.

I'll let my teammates do the talking (possibly on here after the tournament!) about this deck, because right around the time these changes were being discovered, I was thinking long and hard about what I actually thought was the right choice for this event, regardless of what I wanted the right choice to be. I think in the past two events, my constructed deck choice has been overly based on what I think the correct choice is supposed to look like, instead of what my gut is telling me is the correct decision to have the best chance to win matches at the event. On Sunday night, I was trying to get back to my roots - to again be the scrappy player who played Quint Combo at the Arena Championships and Mono Red at PT Aetherdrift because they knew they couldn't expect to outplay their best-in-the-world opponents, but they sure could outdo them in deck selection.

We expected Prowess to be a wildly popular choice at this tournament. We also expected Landfall to be popular, though not as popular as it ended up being (by a factor of about 2). The third most popular deck at the time ostensibly had a good matchup against both of these decks (and the data matched this in our internal testing), and while it struggled against a few tier 2 choices like Lessons, Jeskai Control, and GB Midrange, it was still winning a healthy portion of matches, even in its "bad matchups".

Despite being an Izzet deck and a cantrip deck, this is not a deck you pick if you want to feel lots of "agency" over your matches (at least if understood and played correctly). It's a linear aggro deck playing mostly 4-ofs whose cards are all designed to do one thing: put spells in your graveyard to gain fast mana advantages and put powerful creatures onto the battlefield early in the game - then hopefully have your cards also play double duty to help those creatures win the game.

My teammate Haven likes to joke that every deck she plays is Amulet Titan (and she hearts Amulet Titan!!!), but as much as I hate to admit that our traitorous former teammates on The Boulder (who we love, and will crush) cooked for the last PT, Spellementals is a deck with a lot of Amulet-like properties.

I don't have as many reps as I'd like to have on this deck, but I do believe it was the best choice I personally could have made for this tournament.

My plan for this PT is to show my opponents my Elementals, and ask them to respond.

Oh, and I feel great about our limited prep. Toni says PTs are easy when you 6-0 limited, and I'd like to test his theory out this weekend.