The PT is in the books, and to probably no-one’s surprise, I did not win the Pro Tour. I did do reasonably well, and in this article, I’ll go over the process that led me to play the deck I did in constructed.

Since my last article, I had mostly been testing Standard before going to Brussels to meet my team members. From all the brews in the last article, not many have survived the testing process. Some new brews popped up, and some of the decks underwent some significant changes. Overall, I’m pretty happy with how much I’ve been learning about Standard. You might wonder if it wasn’t a “waste” to test all these decks that turned out to be “not good enough”, but I don’t think so. Every time you discard a deck, it’s because you’ve learned something about it, or about the opposition, and this knowledge helps building and tuning other decks.

Between my last article and the start of the team preparation, we’ve also had a large Standard tournament, which is bound to influence everybody’s Pro Tour testing. While the SCG circuit is not necessarily comparable with the big leagues, I think we can safely say that some very good players show up to every tournament where there’s this much money on the line, and at the very least, it shows a baseline of which decks are good at beating up on new brews.

The top eight decks as it stood after the SCG Open in Syracuse were most likely Abzan Control and Aggro, a UB(x) deck, Mono Red (with or without splash for [card]Atarka’s Command[/card]), RG Dragon aggro, Gw Devotion, Jeskai Tokens and Sultai Whip. Out of these, I expect Gw Devotion, Jeskai Tokens and Sultai Whip to be less popular. I think a lot of Magic players see Gw Devotion as a “green deck with big dumb creatures”, which isn’t very appealing. Tokens is seen as a gimmicky deck, and who would want to play such a linear strategy when [card]Virulent Plague[/card] is in the format? Sultai Whip made the finals, but I think a lot of people believe Reid Duke could’ve made the finals with just about any deck, and this is just one he thinks is “sweet” and “enjoyable to play”. Reid also definitely profited from playing 5 games in the elimination rounds, where his tutors ([card]Sidisi, Undead Vizier[/card]) could get the perfect one-ofs in his 75. Jacob Wilson profited from that as well, and it’s no surprise to me that they met in the finals (aside from being some of the best players in the tournament).

I think people are mostly wrong on tokens and the devotion deck. I don’t think we’ll see a lot of [card]Virulent Plague[/card] when people can board [card]Drown in Sorrow[/card] in the same decks that could play [card]Virulent Plague[/card], and while less powerful, they hit more decks. On top of that why would you board narrow answers for a deck that’s probably not all that popular? While I think it shouldn’t be less popular, it probably will be anyway. Green Devotion is a midrange deck, which historically speaking has a strong aggro matchup, but is often weak against control. Thanks to [card]Mastery of the Unseen[/card], [card]Whisperwood Elemental[/card] and [card]Deathmist Raptor[/card], this isn’t really the case anymore. Then what are you weak against? You go the biggest of all the midrange decks, and you can gain enormous amounts of life to stabilize against aggressive decks. So far, the only problem I can foresee is [card]Thoughtseize[/card] into a whole lot of removal and a clock, so basically last Standard’s Mono Black Devotion. That deck doesn’t exist anymore, and we currently have just Abzan that can really fill that role, and only if they draw [card]Siege Rhino[/card]s or Tasigurs—Courser isn’t much of a clock (although it can help get you to enough removal to keep Gw off their feet).

Abzan in general seems good still. There aren’t many upgrades for the deck, but the deck didn’t really need upgrades that much either. Jacob Wilson’s Invitational deck incorporated some tech in [card]Sidisi, Undead Vizier[/card] and [card]Satyr Wayfinder[/card] to power up Tasigur, but he didn’t do really well in the Swiss. My guess is that he probably had some mana issues, as 24 lands is very low, even with [card]Satyr Wayfinder[/card]. I also think Satyr Wayfinder, while great to sacrifice to Sidisi and to fill the yard for Tasigur, is really poor in the overall Abzan strategy. As a rock deck, you want every card to make a significant impact, and Wayfinder is very much lacking in that department. In Sultai Control your plan is just to buy time to get to your lategame, and [card]Satyr Wayfinder[/card] being a chump blocker is fine, but in Abzan? You want to trade one for one for ever, and this card doesn’t trade very well. Yes, you get a land off of it, but is that really worth as much? Powering up Delve is more important in Sultai Control too, as in Abzan we already have a 4-mana 4/5 that we can play without filling our graveyard, and we don’t have many other cards that use graveyard resources.

With [card]Satyr Wayfinder[/card], I’ve also found that the graveyard gets filled pretty quickly, and because Abzan doesn’t have much delve other than Tasigur, his ability becomes worse. I haven’t been super impressed with him in the deck recently. I think I’d rather play some [card]Whisperwood Elementals[/card], [card]Ojutai Exemplars[/card] or something of that nature. There are plenty of other great threats that can win a game and provide value when they stay in play. [card]Ojutai Exemplar[/card] is especially interesting to me, as you have plenty of spells that can trigger its ability. It’d be better if you had more instants like [card]Abzan Charm[/card] that don’t need a target to play (that’d be better against control, where the blink effect is the most relevant).

The card [card]Ojutai Exemplars[/card] really makes me want to recreate a deck that can play similarly to Mono Black Devotion from last Standard. Using discard to clear a path for a bunch of threats that can win the game all on their own, combined with the best removal in the format was a winning strategy then, and I’m pretty sure it can be still. [card]Courser of Kruphix[/card] and Brimaz, [card]Siege Rhino[/card] and [card]Ojutai Exemplars[/card], with maybe some [card]Wingmate Roc[/card]s or [card]Whisperwood Elemental[/card]s at the end of the curve? I’m not sure if that manabase works, but man, if it did… I don’t think we can get away with WW, GG and BB on turn three, but maybe 2 of the three works? Let’s try cutting the sacred [card]Courser of Kruphix[/card] (hey, we’ve cut the previously sacred [card]Sylvan Caryatid[/card] before), because that way we can get both Brimaz and the Exemplars in there:

Abzan Nouveau by Jay Lansdaal

[deck][Creatures]3 Brimaz, King of Oreskos
4 Ojutai Exemplars
4 Siege Rhino
3 Wingmate Roc[/Creatures]

[Spells]4 Thoughtseize
2 Bile Blight
3 Sign in Blood
2 Ultimate Price
2 Valorous Stance
4 Abzan Charm
3 Hero’s Downfall
1 Elspeth, Sun’s Champion[/Spells]

[Land]1 Forest
2 Plains
1 Swamp
3 Caves of Koilos
2 Llanowar Wastes
4 Sandsteppe Citadel
2 Temple of Malady
1 Temple of Plenty
4 Temple of Silence
2 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
3 Windswept Heath[/Land][/deck]

Something like this has 17 white sources, 18 black, and 13 green, which should be sufficient in most cases. We might even be able to drop a [card]Llanowar Wastes[/card] for the 4th [card]Caves of Koilos[/card], and have the scrylands and [card]Sign in Bloods[/card] make up for the lack in green sources.

Why [card]Sign in Blood[/card] over [card]Read the Bones[/card]? In general, I’m not sure the “scry 2” effect is worth a full mana when you are not looking for anything specific, and when the difference is between two and three mana, that’s big. It’s the same reason I don’t play the full 4 [card]Hero’s Downfall[/card]s despite them being otherwise strictly better than [card]Ultimate Price[/card]: the mana cost is important. Having a [card]Sign in Blood[/card] and an [card]Ultimate Price[/card] in hand means you can double up on spells as early as turn 4, whereas [card]Read the Bones[/card] and [card]Hero’s Downfall[/card] don’t let you do that until turn six. There have been whole theories of Magic built on the idea of wanting to spend your mana as efficiently as possible, and cheaper spells simply let you do that better than more expensive ones. [card]Sign in Blood[/card] is also not strictly worse, as it can go to the face (which is actually the use that got me qualified for this Pro Tour). Whether you can get BBB1 on turn 4 to double up is a question, but other than that, I like the cheaper spell in this deck.

I’ve tried various versions of this deck (even a straight WB one) before getting to Brussels, but ultimately it wasn’t much better positioned than the normal Abzan Control deck, with a whole lot of close matchups where you win or lose by playing or drawing a little better than your opponent. That was not the kind of deck I was looking for in my first PT. It looked like it was going to be a midrange slugfest after the tournament in Syracuse was all “big aggro” decks like CVM’s Courser + Atarka “Aggro” deck, and Abzan Aggro. The decks that beat those are all midrange decks, so it made sense that we would see a lot of those.

What do you want to play when everybody is on midrange? Probably control, or maybe combo if you can find a good combo deck. While we had Noah Long help us find a good list for [card]Jeskai Ascendancy[/card] combo, none of us really considered it. I can’t tell you why others didn’t, but I know that for me, combo decks like Ascendancy are generally not the best strategy. They don’t play to my strengths as a Magic player. The non-interactivity of the deck was appealing in some way, because when you’re up against the best players in the world, maybe you just want to count on your deck choice and a little bit of luck rather than your play skill. However, if I’m not comfortable in playing the deck, I might give my opponent more openings to interact than I should, and I would hate myself for losing to mistakes because I picked a deck that’s out of my comfort zone.

This proved to be a large factor in general for picking my PT deck. There are a lot of uncertainties when it comes to the PT field, and while we mostly predicted what would happen, you can’t really say for sure “if we beat these three decks, we should be good”. So, you’re all kind of speculating that other teams discover the same things you do, and then you try to position yourself well against what you think they’ll find while not losing to the level 1 decks if people don’t go as deep as you do. In our case (Team WizardTower – consisting of Pascal Maynard, Dan Lanthier, Paul Dean, Philippe Asselin and me), we ran a huge mock tournament (I believe it took longer than the actual Pro Tour), where the best performing decks were Sidisi Whip (Reid Duke’s list), RG aggro, and Abzan Control and Abzan Aggro if I recall correctly. Mono Red also did fine, but as the pilot for the deck in that tournament, I wasn’t all too happy with the deck. There seemed to be too many creatures with a big butt for you to run into, and those coupled with removal spells were too much. Since we expected a lot of those type decks (Abzan midrange/control, and by now also Whip decks, as Sidisi did so well). We did another mock tournament with our top contenders, now adding Abzan Whip to the mix. This was a list we built ourselves, that was mostly Abzan midrange with Whips and [card]Hornet Queen[/card]s to go over the top in midrange matches. It looked something like this:

Abzan Whip

[deck][Creatures]4 Satyr Wayfinder
4 Sylvan Caryatid
4 Courser of Kruphix
1 Reclamation Sage
4 Siege Rhino
1 Sidisi, Undead Vizier
1 Tasigur, the Golden Fang
2 Hornet Queen[/Creatures]

[Spells]2 Thoughtseize
1 Commune With Nature
2 Abzan Charm
3 Hero’s Downfall
2 Whip of Erebos
3 Murderous Cut
2 Elspeth, Sun’s Champion[/Spells]

[Land]3 Forest
1 Plains
2 Caves of Koilos
3 Llanowar Wastes
4 Sandsteppe Citadel
4 Temple of Malady
2 Temple of Silence
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
4 Windswept Heath[/Land][/deck]

This deck performed well, as we expected, because it was built to be good in the metagame we expected, which we played it in. It was just a first draft, and we’d need more time to figure out if it was actually good, and what kind of sideboard we’d need, and if we needed different bullets, and if… yeah we didn’t really have time to do all that. We did some draft prep that night, and decided to sleep on it.

The next day was Thursday, and thus the day before the tournament would start. We were not sure what to play still, and early in the morning I stumbled upon Tom Ross’ updated decklist for Bant Heroic. Now, I haven’t been a fan of Heroic decks, as most look clunky, [card]Heliod’s Pilgrim[/card] is awful, half the enchantments are awful, and you’re playing a very swingy deck. This updated list though, it looked very polished. With [card]Monastery Mentor[/card] main, the deck could go wide as well as up, and main deck [card]Treasure Cruise[/card]s let the deck fight grindier games and chain together combo kills like it’s no man’s business. The list looked like this:

Bant Heroic by Tom Ross

[deck][Creatures]4 Favored Hoplite
2 Lagonna-Band Trailblazer
4 Hero Of Iroas
4 Seeker of the Way
2 Monastery Mentor[/Creatures]

[Spells]2 Ajani’s Presence
4 Defiant Strike
4 Gods Willing
4 Dromoka’s Command
2 Ordeal of Heliod
4 Ordeal of Thassa
2 Treasure Cruise[/Spells]

[Land]1 Forest
4 Plains
1 Island
4 Flooded Strand
4 Mana Confluence
2 Temple of Enlightenment
1 Temple of Mystery
1 Temple of Plenty
4 Windswept Heath[/Land]

[Sideboard]3 Encase in Ice
2 Treasure Cruise
3 Stubborn Denial
2 Disdainful Stroke
1 Lagonna-Band Trailblazer
2 Aqueous Form
1 Ordeal of Heliod
1 Island[/Sideboard][/deck]

We started testing it, because in theory a deck like this destroys green decks, and the amount of incidental lifegain makes it very solid against Red. [card]Dromoka’s Command[/card] was one of the best cards in the format, and this deck seemed to use it the best. The deck was actually really solid to good, but we only had a small sample size to go on, and we had no idea what to do with the sideboard. Still, we were impressed, so much so that Pascal at some point proclaimed “if Tom Ross posts a sideboard guide, I’ll play this deck”.

Lo and behold, 11 am EST, Tom Ross posts an article with an exhaustive sideboard guide. By then, we’d done more testing, and while the results were still good, the deck got destroyed in a couple games too, and we started to doubt if switching this late was a good idea. We had, however, wasted precious time testing it, time we could’ve used to build a good Abzan Whip deck. Paul had long given up on all our efforts and put his fate in the hands of Lucas Siow, asking him for the best Abzan midrange list Siow could produce. Pascal and Dan were starting to consider Whip again, and Phil was almost as undecided as I was. He qualified with an Abzan Whip deck so he was sympathetic to those decks, he played the Heroic deck some, he put control together, and ended up on RG Aggro, which he played with a lot during the mock tournaments.

And me? I was going nuts. I wanted this Heroic deck to be good, because it was a deck I felt comfortable with. I’ve played a lot of Infect in Modern and some in Legacy too, and I’ve enjoyed more of these all-in type decks whenever they were good. I don’t mind making my opponent have it (because they usually don’t). However, the games where we flooded horribly, banked on a [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] and drew land, land, Ordeal, or where we mulled to 4 without ever finding a creature were haunting my thoughts. I did *not* want to play in my first PT and just go 1-4 in constructed because “my draws were mediocre”.

I sleeved up Mono Red, and looked at it for a good half an hour, trying to figure out the sideboard slots. Then I put it away. Mono Red was a bad idea–so many Coursers and other big creatures. I started restlessly browsing, trying to find something that broke a midrange format open. I ended up finding an old PTQ top 8 list from Gerry Thompson and updated it, while Pascal and Dan were in the other room trying to figure out the SB for the Sidisi Whip deck they decided to play for lack of a good Abzan list. I was sleeving up this:

Abzan Unwritten by Jay Lansdaal

[deck][Creatures]4 Satyr Wayfinder
4 Sylvan Caryatid
2 Anafenza, the Foremost
4 Courser of Kruphix
1 Reclamation Sage
2 Reaper of the Wilds
4 Siege Rhino
2 Sidisi, Undead Vizier
2 Soul of Theros
1 Hornet Queen[/Creatures]

[Spells]1 Thoughtseize
2 Hero’s Downfall
1 Utter End
2 Whip of Erebos
2 Murderous Cut
2 See the Unwritten[/Spells]

[Land]1 Caves of Koilos
1 Temple of Silence
2 Plains
2 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
3 Forest
3 Temple of Malady
4 Llanowar Wastes
4 Sandsteppe Citadel
4 Windswept Heath[/Land]

[Sideboard]1 Pharika, God of Affliction
3 Thoughtseize
3 Bile Blight
2 Dromoka’s Command
2 Ultimate Price
2 Abzan Charm
1 Soul of Innistrad
1 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon[/Sideboard][/deck]

… and that’s when Paul looked up from his laptop.

“What the f*** is that?”

“It’s an Abzan Whip deck”

“…with See the Unwritten? You aren’t playing that, right?”

“…”

“Okay, put that away, you are not gonna play a brew at your first PT”

At this point in the conversation, both Pascal and Dan walked into the room and started chiming in as well, telling me it was a really bad idea to play a late night brew, even if you weren’t sure what to play. I’d hate myself all the more if things went badly. I wasn’t so sure, as I think I’d hate myself more for not trusting my own instincts if I did poorly with someone else’s list, but I was willing to admit I probably wasn’t thinking very straight.

And boy was I happy I listened.

I’m not sure if the Abzan list really was that bad, and I’ll find out when I have the time, but after going 5-0 in constructed in Day one with 74/75 Tom Ross’ Bant Heroic deck, I have to thank team WizardTower for preventing me from possibly making a huge mistake. They really are the best.

The one change I made to Tom’s list was to cut a Plains for an extra [card]Ajani’s Presence[/card], which seemed fine. It made me flood a little less, and we had enough white sources in the deck even after cutting a Plains. The extra [card]Ajani’s Presence[/card] seemed useful, but I’m not sure it was the best choice. I think with the amount of green decks in the format with [card]Whisperwood Elemental[/card] main, a single [card]Aqueous Form[/card] might have been better. [card]God’s Willing[/card] does a great job at getting your guys through, as does [card]Dromoka’s Command[/card], but you can’t beat true unblockability if you need to get through multiple Manifested dudes.

For a story about how the actual PT went, check back in later!

Jay Lansdaal
iLansdaal on Twitter