What I Want New Sanctum Members to Know

Table of Contents

• Intro

• What You Need to Know for Your First PT with Sanctum

• The Elephant

• How to Collect Information

• How to Share Information

• The Secret

Intro

I'm competing in the Magic World Championships for a second year in a row. Making it back here is an incredible feeling.

At the same time, I'm never going to get to have the experience of last year's Worlds ever again. It was my first in-person professional Magic tournament. Recently, I've been reflecting on how far Sanctum has helped me come as a player -- I'm a dramatically different and more confident player than I was last October. So much of that is a credit to my teammates and the culture of Sanctum, but of course some unquantifiable part of it is a result of the hard work of that inexperienced player from a year ago, and the choices they made along the way. What about this environment helped me succeed? What have I done right that let me take advantage of it?

Sanctum's professional team is in the lucky position to have a consistent inflow of players who are brand-new to the PT. The choices we make in creating a culture that allows these newer players to have a voice are foundational to our success as team.

This year, I've been slowly pushed into the position of "experienced player" as the inevitable and brutal churn of the professional qualification system rotates so many of the players from last year's Worlds team that I still look up to off of the PT team. For this Worlds, the only returning Sanctum players are myself and cft.

In our postmortems after each Pro Tour, there are some themes that have consistently come up about how we can better prepare new members for the PT process. We've tried incorporating these more and more into the "expectations" we make sure everyone reads before joining the testing server, but more and more I've been realizing there's just so much I want to say that goes beyond what you can put in a few bullet points.

So today, I'm going to give myself the space to say everything I'd have wanted to say to myself if I could time-travel back to the beginning of last year's Worlds prep -- something I luckily actually do have the chance to do now for every new teammate I have the privilege of working with.

What You Need to Know for Your First PT with Sanctum

If I had to put everything I'm about to say into two bullet points, it would be these two:

• Everyone's ideas are very likely to be wrong.

• Your ideas are extremely valuable.

How can these things both be true? How are they more true together than separate?

The Elephant

To explain this, I'm going to return to a metaphor from one of the earliest pieces I wrote about Magic -- the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

Magic is a game about extrapolating effectively from very incomplete data. Every Pro Tour, our team is preparing for a specific constructed format and a specific limited format. Magic is constantly changing, not just with new sets, but with new developments in the metagame. This constant change is a reflection of deep complexity. While certain formats can become "solved" in a broad sense of having a stably dominant deck, there are always forces pushing and pulling as players try to beat the strategies they expect to face and search for new and innovative ways to win.

We will never have enough time to explore the full range of decks, strategies and matchups that could help us win at this upcoming tournament. It is ludicrously impossible to explore the entire possibility space. The entire Magic community fails to do this, so a miniscule team of 10-20 Sanctum players is sure to fail if we try.

As a result, the best way to think of the problem before us is that we are a group of people trying to describe, understand, and analyze some kind of large structure (a format) that we will never be able to "see" from a zoomed-out perspective. We are never going to get a high-resolution picture of the elephant -- all we can do is continue to probe it and figure out its general shape, some particular features, and how they seem to fit together.

To accomplish this difficult task as well as we can, it is absolutely crucial that we both

• Collect lots of information

• Share it rapidly and loudly with each other

The people in this picture each have their own limited and flawed perspective on the elephant. If they don't share these observations with each other, their conclusions will remain limited and flawed.

Even if they do, the group might not come to exactly the right conclusions about the elephant. Maybe they conclude that it's a mammoth - but at least that's a much more accurate answer than a snake.

How to Collect Information

Let's get a bit more specific about the elephant we're trying to learn about. As an example, for Worlds this year it's not precise enough to understand our task as figuring out "Standard" or "Avatar Draft". We have to understand that each Magic tournament is, in a sense, its own unique format to prepare for.

Here are some important pieces of information about the 2025 Magic World Championships:

• There will be 3 rounds of paper, in-pod, closed-decklist Avatar booster draft followed by 4 rounds of open-decklist paper Standard constructed on each day.

• The event takes place on December 5, and decklists will be due by December 3.

• The people we are going to be competing against are ~100 other players who have been very successful in Pro Tours, Regional Championships, and Arena/MTGO championships this year.

• Every player competing in the event probably cares a lot about doing well and will be somewhat nervous on the day of the tournament.

Why do these details matter? They matter because Magic is an extremely contextual game.

You're very far ahead on board with a large army of small creatures, and probably have a lethal attack next turn in a limited game. Should you play out that extra 4/4 creature from your hand, or hold it back in case your opponent has a wrath effect? The answer to this simple yer-or-no question depends entirely on context...

• Are we playing with open-decklists? (this is unusual, but would dramatically change our approach if true. Maybe we've seen a wrath in the previous game.)

• How many wraths are there in the format in your opponent's colors?

• How many wraths are there that only kill small creatures?

• Is there a range of cards your opponent could have that would let them survive if you didn't play your large creature (say, a medium-sized lifelinker?)

• Do you have more "gas" in the rest of your hand, or is this your last relevant spell?

I could go on, but you get it. Making winning choices in Magic, whether in-game or in the broader sense of preparing for a tournament, cannot be accomplished without paying attention to the specific details and context of a situation.

In my view, here is why each of the details above matter for preparing for Worlds:

• Normal Pro Tours are 6 rounds of draft and 10 rounds of constructed, but for Worlds this ratio is 6/8. This means that draft performance is more important at Worlds than it is for a PT (35% vs. 42% of your overall winrate to be precise).

• The decks we are likely to face at the tournament are decks other teams will expect to be good into the standard format specifically as it exists in late November-early December.

• Every match at Worlds will be played against another highly competent and well-prepared Magic player. Winning these kinds of matches requires creating different advantages than the kinds of advantages that can be created against most RCQ or Arena opponents

• Humans who care a lot and are very nervous about achieving a particular difficult outcome act very differently from humans who only care somewhat and are partially just having fun.

Don't get too hung up on Worlds in particular - most of these points can also be made about the differences between a normal Pro Tour and the typical ways most people play competitive Magic, like attending a weekend RCQ or grinding standard on Arena. The point is that the "elephant" we're trying to collect information on (how to win matches at Worlds) is meaningfully different from the elephant you're likely used to (how to win matches on Arena/at the RCQ & RC level).

What does this mean for our information collection process? It specifically means that information collected in conditions that closely match the environment of the tournament we're preparing for is the most valuable kind of information to collect.

This high-quality information collection looks like:

• Playing in-house, open-decklist constructed matches against other professional-level players playing decks we expect to be popular at the tournament. This is best accomplished through Discord and on Cockatrice.

• Playing 8-person pod drafts with other strong limited players who are trying their best to win. This is best accomplished through MTGO single elimination queues and coordinating paper drafts at the testing house.

There are some things we want to do in testing that aren't exclusively geared towards authentically simulating tournament play. I talk about those in How to Test Effectively, but the important thing to know is that all testing should be geared toward effective information gathering about the environment of the actual tournament we are playing. One way I like to psychologically get myself in the mood for this is to tell myself I'm "always playing the tournament" in testing - it just so happens that only the final few matches actually "count".

There are many reasons why these kinds of reps won't be 100% of the Magic we play during the testing process. Sometimes you're burnt out after a long day of work, and don't have the social battery to play Magic with others. Sometimes you don't have the tickets or the money to fire off a hundred MTGO single elim drafts where you're consistently getting beaten by some of the best limited players in the world. Sometimes you just thought of an interesting deck idea, but no one on the team is available to test against it.

High quality reps are very hard to acquire -- but extremely valuable. Your time management throughout the testing process should be geared towards spending as much time and energy as possible on getting high-quality reps, instead of on other forms of playing Magic. I promise it will translate to growth as a player and better performance in the tournament!

How to Share Information

We've talked about how to effectively collect information, but what about sharing it? Communication is absolutely essential to the testing process, so that we aren't stuck in our own information silos (think of the narrow perspectives of each person in the elephant cartoon).

The most important thing to know about sharing information is that it is extremely useful to be wrong. One of the best scientific methods available to us for figuring out the truth is to make claims and then try to falsify them (shoutout to my guy Karl Popper!).

Your approach to information sharing in the PT testing process should be one of trying to generate as many testable ideas as possible and then letting the testing process prove them wrong. This doesn't mean you shouldn't be trying to generate "good" ideas. Rather, it means that you should know that there are very few good ideas and many bad ones. There's only one elephant, but there are many things the elephant could be. The only way we are going to get better at talking about the elephant is if we say, many times over, "it could be this!" and then "wait no it can't be, because if it were, I wouldn't have observed that".

Ideas are only able to be proven wrong if they are shared with others. You must submit to this mortifying ordeal to be a useful teammate. If you have an idea for a new deck, or a card to add to an existing deck, or a drafting strategy, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD do not keep it to yourself because you're worried your idea will be shot down or criticized. Instead, you should share it as soon and as extensively as possible, and expect it to be poked and prodded.

When you're on the other side of the coin (someone else shares an idea and you can think of some problems with it or evidence you've collected that doesn't match), it's equally your duty to poke and prod at your teammate's idea. This process of idea-refinement is the erosion that leaves us, in an ideal world, with beautiful pearls of truth at the end of the process. (Though most of the time, they're more like nicely-shaped skipping stones with some bumpy edges).

As a very general rule of thumb, more experienced players will be better at generating ideas that are hard to immediately falsify, and newer players might share lots of ideas that have already been thoroughly explored and debunked, or at least are easy to shoot down. This might result in you feeling like your ideas are constantly being dismissed and disregarded, and the group is spending more time and effort on the ideas of the players it respects more.

It's always hard to disentangle this effect from the natural social dynamics that happen when a team has a wide range of Magic resumes and strength of personal bonds. There will be an unavoidable element of this in how your ideas are treated at first. Part of the value you can bring as a newer player is pushing against consensuses that end up forming because players have worked together before and trust each other too much. Luckily, we have an incredibly strong tool for mitigating this bias called testing.

If you are able to win with your ideas in high-quality testing matches against other players on the team, you have a right (and a duty) to demand that they are paid attention to. If you think an idea has been shouted down too loudly before being given a chance to breathe, it is your responsibility to insist that you be given a chance to prove that idea's worth in testing matches.

It's also on you to abandon your ideas whenever you are genuinely convinced that they've been sufficiently falsified, because time spent trying one idea is always time not spent trying another one.

The solution to the problem that everyone's ideas, especially yours, are extremely likely to be wrong isn't to avoid sharing yours and let the more experienced players dominate the process. The thing to remember is that even the best players in the world are still going to be wrong far more often than they are right, and it's crucial that the whole team keeps generating and sharing ideas so that we are ever more likely to stumble upon an idea that seems miraculously impossible to falsify. Nevermind that fact that this is also the best way to improve as a player -- the more you see your ideas fail, the better you'll become at generating ones that don't.

To be a good teammate, you must join in on the ruthless competition to prove everybody wrong, including yourself. This is how we get stronger together.

The Secret

Tattoo it on the back of your eyelids and in the folds of your brain.

YOU BELONG HERE.

Everything I've talked about so far is very psychologically difficult to do.

You are here because you have dedicated an incalculable amount of time and effort towards becoming one of the best in the world at playing this game. You care about how good you are at playing Magic. It's part of your identity. You enjoy winning and you don't enjoy losing nearly as much. Your dream is to win this tournament and prove to everyone that you're one of the best Magic players to have ever lived, and your nightmare is that you won't win a single game and you'll be laughed out of the room.

It's hard for anyone who cares deeply enough about proving their own abilities to actively put themselves in situations where they're going to lose a lot -- and that's exactly what a good testing process asks for from you. Try hard, fail, and fail more. Fail some more. More than that. Learn why you're wrong. Try something different, and learn it again.

Feeling confident that you're going to crush the PT yet?

(If you've been losing & learning a lot, you should be).

Maybe this isn't your whole truth. Maybe you're just in it for the experience, happy to be here, and looking forward to the fun and joy of being on a PT testing team (among other things, it is deeply fun and joyful!). But I'm willing to bet that this is at least some of your truth, even if it's not something you'd talk about outwardly. It's hard for anyone to reach this level in the game without caring deeply about their own skill and proving to themselves that they can compete with the best.

I also know it because Sanctum, specifically, is a team for players who have extra reason to doubt that they belong.

Players who have seen the culture of competitive Magic and thought "maybe that's not for me", even if at the same time it spoke to something deep within them and they knew they wanted to try anyways.

Players who knew from the beginning that they did belong, but for some reason (or for reasons they understood far too well), the people around them refused to see it.

Players who wanted to play against the best possible opponents, but had to deal with so much extra bullshit on the way to facing them (or while facing them) that it sometimes just wasn't worth it.

Players who came back anyways because they loved the game and the community more than it seemed to love them.

Players who couldn't help but let the doubt creep in and wonder if they'd keep their fire alive through all the attempts to wash it out.

Players who kept going.

You made it this far.

We want your ideas. We want your criticisms. We want your theories, your brews, your matchup thoughts. We want you to feel comfortable being wrong, a lot, because we want to be wrong a lot too. We want you to lose, and then tell everyone else why you lost. We want you to beat us, and then tell everyone why you beat us.

Everybody on this team knows, possibly even better than you do, that merely by making it this far, you're an extremely strong Magic player and an invaluable asset to have as a teammate.

The only thing we can't do is prove it to you. To do everything it takes to help this team, and yourself, succeed, you have to believe in your core that you belong here.

That's the secret. Welcome. Let's get started.