What Went Wrong at Pro Tour Aetherdrift

One strange thing about important Magic tournaments is that you spend far more time preparing for them than you do actually playing in them. And then you spend even more time reflecting on them after they’re over. Compared to the months spent anticipating and reflecting on the event, Magic tournaments go by in a flash: they compress all the tough decisions, lucky breaks, and emotional highs and lows into one fateful weekend.

It’s now been over five months since I participated in Pro Tour Aetherdrift. I haven’t played a significant tournament since then, and the event went poorly, so it’s easy to stew over the experience despite so much time having passed. My 7-9 record was technically my worst Pro Tour record in six PT-level events lifetime. This isn’t statistically anomalous: I had a 56% lifetime PT winrate entering the event and won 44% of my matches in the event, well within a normal range of likely outcomes. What made it doubly frustrating though was that (1) I think I’m better at Magic now than I was when I played in these past events and (2) this was my first time on a very strong, organized testing team.

In particular, my constructed rounds were disastrous. I went 4-2 in Aetherdrift draft and 3-7 in Standard playing Jeskai Convoke. I’ll focus here on constructed since that’s where things went awry.

For reference, I played this list: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/6937676#paper

Below are various factors that may have contributed to my lack of success.

1.    Fancy Deck Choice Syndrome

I qualified for Pro Tour Aetherdrift by playing Gruul Mice at Arena Championship 7. On the whole, I was lucky in that event and also played well. I felt in control of my decision-making, and the deck fit my strengths as a player: lots of technical sequencing decisions, risk-assessment, making my opponent’s cards line up poorly.

The Pro Tour was only two months after the Arena Championship and Gruul Mice remained a tier one deck. The lists had barely changed at all from the Arena Championship, and they incorporated zero new Aetherdrift cards. Gruul Mice was on every player’s radar. It therefore seemed difficult to get a leg up on the competition by running back the same deck. Despite this, Gruul was so solid and hard to exploit that if I had tested by myself, it’s highly plausible I would have just played Gruul and focused on limited.

But I wasn’t testing by myself. Rather, I was fortunate to work with Team Handshake for the event. In this context the notion of playing Gruul seemed especially bad: I’d be giving up the advantage of working with a top team if I simply defaulted to the stock deck I would have played anyway. With that said, multiple times later in the testing process I outwardly acknowledged that I’d probably be maximizing my win percentage if I locked in Gruul and focused on drafting, and several teammates agreed with me.

Meanwhile, some of our team (namely Simon Nielsen and Karl Sarap) was high on Jeskai Convoke. I had previously thought the matchup vs Gruul was bad, but our plan of Regal Bunnicorn, Sheltered by Ghosts, and Surge of Salvation seemed to swing the matchup to at least 50/50. Moreover, Domain was supposed to be difficult, but with sideboard counters the matchup seemed fine. We initially thought Esper Pixie was a good matchup but in the last few days of testing we felt the opposite. Towards the very end we added a couple of Wilt-Leaf Lieges to our sideboard, which are a high-variance way to steal the matchup (or alternatively sit in our hand and do basically nothing).

Overall, the matchup spread for Convoke appeared solid—probably about as good as the matchup spread for Gruul. The tiebreaker for me was that Convoke was unexpected and would give me a deck edge. In retrospect, I believe this effect was too small to override my greater confidence in Gruul both in it being a strong deck and in my ability to play it.  

     2.    I Didn’t Have Much Time

I drew the above conclusions—that Convoke is a good deck and with a solid matchup spread—based on relatively few games actually playing the deck. By comparison, I had played hundreds of games with Gruul in the weeks and months leading up to the Pro Tour. I had played a reasonable amount with Boros Convoke—a different Convoke iteration we had been trying—and I had played a bit with similar Convoke decks in past formats. But the Jeskai Convoke list we registered I probably played fewer than 40 total games with before the event. I’m not even sure I was wrong about the aforementioned conclusions, but most of them involved trusting my teammates rather than confirming them myself. Which, to be clear, is fine—the Convoke ringleaders, Simon and Karl, are better and more experienced players than I am, and I certainly trust them—but I didn’t have the level of personal comfort with the deck choice that comes from seeing it winning in my own hands.

I also didn’t have many reps playing the games. I felt comfortable enough playing the deck in testing. I understood the common technical decisions and broader gameplans. (If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have played the deck.) In the tournament itself, I didn’t feel uncomfortable making the decisions, and almost no in-game decisions jumped out as obviously wrong. But I didn’t play the sheer number of games required to master the deck and it's possible I was missing subtle things.

One area where I’m sure I made mistakes was mulliganning. These are in my opinion the most challenging decisions when playing the deck. Jeskai Convoke asks a lot of you: you need three colors of mana AND not too many painlands AND enablers AND payoffs. AND our version added an additional layer of inconsistency because it was playing extra situationally powerful cards like Bunnicorn and Sheltered by Ghosts which range from great to horrible depending on the matchup. Overall, Convoke has a very low floor and a very high ceiling, but you don’t have the luxury of mulliganning every hand without the right elements. You have to take risks: keeping a one-lander that can produce a turn 2 Knight-Errant if you hit a land, for example.  These decisions aren’t easy, but Simon presented a series of mulligan decisions to the rest of the Convoke players in the day prior to deck submission and I felt comfortable with the decisions/thought process and found I was usually reaching the right conclusions, even with the more unintuitive hands. Thus, once again I felt comfortable enough registering the deck. With that said, I did get several mulligan decisions wrong during the event.

The lack of prep time had far-reaching effects beyond not getting reps with Convoke. I also didn’t draft enough (I only got in around ten MTGO single elimination drafts when my goal was at least twenty); I didn’t have time to try Eli Kassis’s UW Control deck that ended up being the best choice in the whole tournament; and most frustratingly, I had built a version of Domain with no Caverns early in testing that I was optimistic on but I ended up not having enough time to put it through its paces (a similar version ended up winning the whole Pro Tour, and Domain was the most winning archetype among the popular decks). I spent a lot of time testing and brainstorming the formats, but with a full-time job I ended up having nowhere near enough time to do everything I wanted.

3.    Other, Non-Magic Factors

I generally perform worse in live tournaments than in online tournaments. When I do poorly in a live tournament with a deck/in a format after winning a lot online, I’m often left scratching my head. There are many possible causes:

• Do my brain synapses not fire in the same way when playing live Magic because I don’t recognize patterns in the same way I do online?
• Am I wasting mental energy tracking triggers and the physical boardstate, particularly challenging with a deck like Convoke that uses a bunch of tokens and dice?
• Am I getting physically exhausted from long days of stressful matches? By Round 16 was physical and mentally exhausted, but I felt relatively energetic up until the last couple rounds of Day 2.
• Am I not shuffling enough? My draws were bad; am I not sufficiently randomizing? Sounds unlikely, but who knows?
• Am I getting cheated? None of my opponents seemed suspicious. But so many cheaters are caught after years of what was presumed to be clean play, which indicates many people are not catching cheats—am I one of those people getting cheated?

I find all of these possibilities unsettling, because each tests abilities I don’t consider core to being a good Magic player. But the last possibility is the most unsettling.

I can fix most or all of these things by simply playing more live tournaments. The problem is, I don’t enjoy live tournaments very much. They require acquiring cards on short notice; they involve expensive travel; they’re exhausting; and most of all, they are a big time commitment in the face of many competing obligations. Going forward, I will try to attend some more live tournaments here and there, both to get more live reps and to hopefully change my mindset such that I start to enjoy attending them more. Traveling with friends is one easy way to improve the experience.

      4.    Maybe It Was Just Bad Luck

I cast a turn 2 Knight-Errant only once or twice the entire tournament. My Gruul opponents had the Heartfire Hero into Valiant enabler draw most games. Many opening hands were clear mulligans (lacking critical pieces with no upside of a powerful start). I never assembled Bunnicorn + Sheltered vs Gruul, and I never put a Liege into play versus Pixie. While I certainly made some questionable mulligan decisions, it felt like almost all my close calls were in situations like the following: I’m on the draw against Gruul, I’ve already mulliganned once, and they ended up having a turn 4 kill. Which is to say: I surely did some things wrong (not mulliganning to five), but in those situations it felt like the optimal play would increase my likelihood of winning from, let’s say, 10% to 13%.

Across the ten constructed rounds it was rare for my deck to function well for multiple games in the same match. My opponents didn’t have poor draws. Most of my losses were blowouts. It didn’t feel like there was much I could do, other than mulligan (or not mulligan) a few borderline hands. I felt like Convoke had betrayed me. Maybe I was just very unlucky. But the days were long, and I didn’t have a full mastery of my deck, so maybe there are subtle plays I totally missed at the time.

 

The two days of Pro Tour Aetherdrift were a blur of frustration and regret. (Notably, the days spent with my team leading up to the event were extremely fun.) Five months later, I’m no more sure of where things went wrong than I was on the flight home, but going forward I will resolve to do the following:

• Default to the deck I am much more familiar with when deciding between two choices that seem similarly good. Even if I feel comfortable with the choice with which I have fewer reps, I will choose the one with which I have far more reps.
• Assume I have less time than I think I do and cut my losses when it gets late in the testing process. That means locking in a deck earlier and focusing on tuning the final slots/getting reps or, in the case of the Pro Tour, focusing on the draft format.
• Attend at least one or two RC/Spotlight Series events per year, traveling there with friends.

Hopefully I get another chance at the Pro Tour!