Hello all! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Ondřej Stráský and I’m a professional Magic: the Gathering player from the Czech Republic with notable results that include two Pro Tour Top 8 appearances in recent seasons. I had the pleasure of attending the 2016 World Championship this year, sponsored by Face to Face Games alongside Oliver Tiu.

So, how did I manage to clinch an invite to the most prestigious Magic event of the year?

The short answer is lots of dedication and even more luck. I didn’t have the greatest season ever (I only finished in the Top 8 of one event throughout the whole year), and I had the least impressive yearly results (in regards to Top 8 appearances) than basically every other competitor at Worlds. On the other hand, my results and final records were consistently high throughout the season.

Going into the last Pro Tour of the season, I needed to finish with a record of 11-5 or better in order to qualify for Worlds. It most definitely would not be an easy task to accomplish, but I liked my deck and I was really happy with our team’s (Team Face to Face Games) preparation.

The whole squad played our take on GB Delirium (with Grim Flayer!), but I was the lone player to register UB Zombies. I knew I was taking a risk by playing a different deck than the rest of our team (especially given that Team Face to Face Games has had the most impressive and consistent Constructed team results in recent years), but I had had a lot of practice with the Zombie deck and I overall prefer the play style over the midrange style of Green/Black.

Fast forward to Round 5 of the Pro Tour and I’m sitting at an unimpressive 2-2 record, piloting a Zombies deck that was built for a different expected metagame. I had thought there would be way more Bant Company decks than there actually ended up being, and I was losing hope that I would be crushing round after round of Bant opponents.

I’m not going to lie or sugar coat it; I felt absolutely miserable.

I was shuffling up for Game 3 of my fifth round match, thinking about how I screwed up my whole season by choosing the wrong deck and by not listening to my teammates. I had a horrible flashback to my second ever Pro Tour, where I went 0-4 in Constructed and dropped. I can’t quite put in words exactly how terribly it felt to have played some of the worst Magic in my career at that Pro Tour.

I then had somewhat of an epiphany. I realized that I didn’t have anything to lose at this stage by putting my best foot forward, tightening up my play, and giving it my absolute best in hopes that I dodge my bad matchups (even though my bad matchups seemed to be 50% of the entire field). Essentially, I forced myself to stay positive even though I might not have truly believed that I would do well.

Fast forward to Round 15 and I’m sitting at a Table 7, intentionally drawing with Martin Muller into a Top 16 finish. Classic lucky Ondřej . . .

I was ecstatic! I attended the World Championship last year and it was an amazing experience. However, because I was happy simply having been invited, I didn’t prepare or play very well and I ended up disappointed with my results. I wanted to do much better this time around.

Let’s talk preparation, shall we?

Although only twenty-four (24) players are invited to play in the Magic World Championship, there were seven (7) of us from Team Face to Face Games who made the cut! With such small tournaments however, it becomes somewhat awkward to test with too many other players since you end up playing the same people multiple times over the course of the event. Rather than test with a larger group like we normally would for a Pro Tour, we split up into smaller testing groups.

I was initially approached by Oliver Tiu, who had hoped we could test and prepare for the World Championship together. Although I had only met Oliver three weeks prior to the start of our last PT testing session, I was extremely impressed by the young prodigy. It seemed like a no-brainer to accept his offer and we decided to test for Worlds as a pair!

After Pro Tour Sydney was all said and done, I took a short vacation to New Zealand, during which time I played the Magic Online Championship Series. The MOCS format was Modern, and I ended up playing the same Jund list piloted by the eventual winner, Jacob Wilson.

I quite liked the deck and I felt like it had a favorable matchup against the three decks which I viewed as being the best in Modern – Affinity, Infect, and Suicide Zoo. During the flight home, I was trying to settle between playing Jund or Abzan. I shared my thoughts with Oliver, mentioning that other players at Worlds might choose to play Jund or Abzan as well given how well the decks have been doing lately. Oliver then mentioned that his friend Thien Nguyen had been piloting a sweet Scapeshift deck recently and that we should consider playing it at Worlds. Since Scapeshift and Valakut-style strategies are usually well positioned against G/B midrange decks, I was intrigued from the get-go.

Oliver then shipped me the deck list and my excitement was cut short, replaced with some hesitation. Four copies of Khalni Heart Expedition?!

While I was hesitant at first, I decided to stay open-minded and tested the deck on Magic Online. I ended up winning game after game with the deck, and we settled on playing the list at Worlds. All that was left to do was to fine-tune the list so that it had a better matchup against Infect and Suicide Zoo, but we were ideally hoping to dodge those matchups in any case. Here’s the final deck list we registered:

[deck]
[Lands]
4 Cinder Glade
3 Forest
7 Mountain
2 Stomping Ground
4 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
3 Windswept Heath
4 Wooded Foothills
[/Lands]
[Spells]
2 Anger of the Gods
4 Explore
2 Farseek
3 Khalni Heart Expedition
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Scapeshift
4 Search for Tomorrow
2 Summoner’s Pact
[/Spells]
[Creatures]
4 Primeval Titan
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
[/Creatures]
[Sideboard]
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Anger of the Gods
2 Nature’s Claim
3 Obstinate Baloth
2 Sudden Shock
2 Chalice of the Void
1 Tireless Tracker
3 Engineered Explosives
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

Our deck choice for Modern turned out great, with Oliver and I having a collective record of 7-1 with the Scapeshift deck. My only loss was to Yuuya Watanabe who was playing a Goryo’s Vengeance deck (one of our worst matchups). Our gamble had paid off, especially given that no one in the field was playing Suicide Zoo and only one player was on Infect. I was very impressed with the deck, and I would seriously consider playing it again for a larger tournament such as a Grand Prix or Pro Tour.

I began preparing for the Standard portion of Worlds by playing a slew of good decks that made themselves known at the most recent Pro Tour. In testing Green/Black Delirium, 4-color Emerge, Temur Emerge, Bant Company, and Zombies, I felt most comfortable playing Bant company. However, the problem was that the online meta game was that it was skewed towards people mostly playing Bant and Blue/Red Burn. Even though the online meta game might not mimic the Worlds meta game, I felt happy enough with the deck list to decide that Bant would be our backup plan if we couldn’t find anything better to play.

In the following weeks, a couple of Temur Emerge strategies made a big splash at some larger events, and Oliver and I started testing with the Emerge/Emrakul decks to see if they were the real deal. No matter what we tested with, Oliver kept crushing me with the Emrakul strategies. On the flip side, when I would pilot the Emerge decks, I wasn’t doing as well as Oliver (I guess he’s the better pilot)!

Since Olivier kept winning in our matches of Bant Company versus Temur Emerge, I decided to stick with the kid’s decision and sleeve up his 75:

[deck]
[Lands]
9 Forest
4 Island
1 Mountain
2 Shivan Reef
2 Shrine of the Forsaken Gods
4 Yavimaya Coast
[/Lands]
[Spells]
2 Gather the Pack
4 Grapple with the Past
4 Kozilek’s Return
3 Nissa’s Pilgrimage
3 Traverse the Ulvenwald
4 Vessel of Nascency
[/Spells]
[Creatures]
3 Elder Deep-Fiend
3 Emrakul, the Promised End
2 Ishkanah, Grafwidow
2 Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy
1 Nissa, Vastwood Seer
2 Pilgrim’s Eye
3 Primal Druid
2 Wretched Gryff
[/Creatures]
[Sideboard]
1 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
3 Dispel
1 Coax from the Blind Eternities
1 Ishkanah, Grafwidow
2 Tireless Tracker
1 Kiora, Master of the Depths
1 Explosive Vegetation
2 Invasive Surgery
1 Lashweed Lurker
2 Gnarlwood Dryad
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

I should always stick to testing with Oliver because our choice for Standard was equally great! I finished with a 3-1 record, losing only to a couple of manascrew draws against Brad Nelson, while Oliver went 2-1-1 losing to his personal kryptonite in Shota Yasooka.

With all of our hard work and educated guesses at what the Constructed meta game would look like at the World Championship, Oliver Tiu managed to clinch a Top 4 appearance!

My Worlds story was not as exciting though. Although I went 6-2 in the Constructed portion of the tournament, I couldn’t win a single Limited match, going 0-6 in drafts. I’ve always considered Limited (draft and sealed) to be the weakest part of my game, and I almost never have a positive record in our preparatory drafts for any given PT (although I have had some decent results at the actual Pro Tour events).

My first draft was harder than usual to navigate properly. You can view my draft picks here. I started by picking a Foul Emissary, having noted that there were three Emerge cards in the pack and hoping to wheel one and knowing that Green/Blue was one of the more powerful color combinations in the Eldritch Moon/Shadows Over Innistrad draft format. At that point, I already had tunnel vision and was trying to force U/G more than I should have been.

I picked up some good green cards, but made the mistake of underrating Hamlet Captain which might have sent some weird signals to my neighbor. I passed Hamlet Captain since I’m not very fond of the G/W Humans archetype in this limited format, but I should have been more open-minded since it looks like it might have been one of the more powerful color combinations that was open in my draft pod.

I knew I was in trouble when none of the Emerge cards wheeled. In the end, I ended up in Green/White anyway but my deck was more midrange and was lacking tricks and removal. I had a Tamiyo and some fixing to go with it but I still wasn’t happy with my deck. I lost the first two rounds pretty quickly because of some miserable draws on my part and stronger decks from my opponents. In my third round against Takimura, I was put in a position where I was dead on board and needed to top deck an answer to his flying creature. Luckily, I drew a Swift Spinner and the game took a turn in my favor. Unluckily, Takimura drew into a copy of Certain Death to clinch the win. Bummer.

As for the second draft, my deck was mediocre, but it had potential. I drafted an aggressive Red/Black deck with a bunch of removal and tricks (a definite 2-1 deck in my mind). Unfortunately, I got some bad draws versus Owen Turtenwald, then was paired up against Joel Larsson who already had a win. I lost game one against Joel fair and square and in the second game had a Ruthless Disposal countered by a Turn Aside after taking a mulligan. Another blowout!

I was paired against Andrea Mengucci in the last round and was in a good position to win, but I was tilted from the previous rounds and let the victory slip through my fingers.

So, there you have it! A combination of bad drafting, some unlucky draws, and some of my own misplays led me to a 0-6 draft record. While the competition at the World Championship is as impressive as ever, there’s no excuse for sloppy play.

All in all, I finished with a disappointing 6-8 record (placing 18th out of 24 players). Overall, I feel like the weekend was a wasted opportunity given that Oliver and I had solid Constructed records and given how badly I threw away the drafts. Oh well! There’s no rest for the weary, and it’s time for me to go back to practicing and honing my drafting skills in hopes of doing better next time.

Even though I didn’t do as well as I had hoped, the whole PAX experience was amazing. Wizards of the Coast put up great show and I’m really glad I could attend. Big thanks go out to my friends who made the bitter weekend a much more enjoyable experience, and a huge shout-out to Oliver for being such a fantastic testing partner. I’m incredibly proud of his accomplishments and for making the Top 4.

The final shout-out goes out to all of my followers and to all of you readers. I hope you enjoyed reading about my World Championship experience!

If you have any questions, hit me up in the comments section or on Twitter (@OndrejStrasky)!