With six of Face to Face Games Montreal BFZ league’s top eight players returning for the OGW league’s top eight, it has been amply demonstrated that success in MTG league play is not mere luck, but a function of skill. And if winning a league takes skill, Phil Martin has shown that he has copious quantities of it, winning OGW league just as he did the BFZ league before it. With the brand-new SOI league coming up soon, I decided to interview Phil to see if he was willing to teach both new and old league participants alike what it takes to win two six-week long tournaments in a row.
An Introduction to League Culture
League is a not a purely casual format; nor is it purely competitive play. It’s somewhere between the kitchen table and a Grand Prix: a ‘semi-formal’ or ‘business casual’ way to play the game. Take-backs are out of the question, but good-natured chat is welcome. Time is not an issue, but real stakes are on the line with each match played (because the loser is obligated to add a pack to their card pool at their own expense), so matches can still be intense.
The intention of the league has always been to provide an extended and unique play experience that players can’t get in any other tournament format, and for players to play all of their possible matches. However, the past league’s ruleset could encourage ‘camping’ behavior, in that it was possible to ‘store up’ lots of matches early in the league to satisfy minimum play requirements, and then just hide in the hills until most other players have been eliminated, and then return to take part in the top eight finals. If you have a reputation for being a tough opponent, like two-time league winner Phil, it could be even harder to convince people to play you:
“Most players front-loaded their matches in the first few weeks, which made it really hard to get games in later on during the tournament, as a lot of players were close to elimination and not really looking for games.”
This was not a desirable state of affairs, as it led to the odd situation of people trying to win the tournament by NOT playing matches; which was never the intention of the league. The upcoming SOI league will have a different ruleset that will fix this issue, and make play a more casual-friendly and less ‘gameable’ experience, but you’ll have to wait until my next article for more details on that. Suffice it to say that changing the rules for the SOI league with these factors in mind, we will also change league culture for the better moving forward.
How to Win a League Tournament
Every league starts out like a mutated variant of Sealed: you open six packs of a newly-released expansion and make a sixty-card deck out of that card pool. Whenever you lose, you can add a ‘punishment pack’ (a Standard-legal pack of Magic cards) to your card pool to strengthen it. After you’ve added ten packs, you get eliminated when you take your eleventh loss. So an important part of league strategy is figuring out which expansion to open for your punishment packs, which will maximally improve your deck. Given the linear nature of the recent Zendikar sets, Phil notes that:
“It is almost always better to keep opening the same set(s) in order to fully benefit from the synergies present within a set… The potential reward [for opening packs from different sets] is simply not worth the risk of completely whiffing.”
As for how to organize your initial pool, and how to evolve it with the addition of punishment packs, he has the following recommendations:
“I usually try to start off the league with the three strongest colors and reassess my pool after every match to see if I can switch to a more consistent 2- or 2.5-color deck – usually whichever colors have the most consistent mix of bombs and removal.”
This approach was enough to make Phil a lock for the top eight of the two previous leagues. OGW league, however, had something very different in store for its best players: A Megadraft, sponsored by FaceToFace Games Montreal.
What’s a Megadraft?
Megadraft is a format where you draft one pack of every Standard-legal expansion, in chronological order according to release date, to create a sixty-card limited deck. So for this Megadraft, the top eight players of the league got to open one pack of KTK, passing to the left, one pack of FRF, passing to the right, one pack of DTK, passing left, ORI passing right, BFZ passing left, and OGW passing right. That’s a lot of drafting, especially as I had each player write down each card as they chose it. Despite the energy and concentration required, players had a lot of good things to say about the format. Phil’s reaction to it was the following:
“Overall the Megadraft was very chaotic but also truly embodied the spirit of the league which encourages diversity of cards… It was a lot of fun revisiting the past two years or so of draft formats one last time before some of them rotate out, and try to figure out which archetypes were able to support each other across various planes.”
We followed Phil’s picks over the course of the Megadraft, so you can see how he put together his winning deck by viewing his card selections below. The bolded picks represent cards which he included in his final decklist:
Khans of Tarkir: 4/14 (28.6% of pack used)
KTK 01: [card]Crackling Doom[/card]
KTK 02: [card]Tuskguard Captain[/card]
KTK 03: [card]Mardu Hordechief[/card]
KTK 04: [card]Trail of Mystery[/card]
KTK 05: [card]Mardu Heart-Piercer[/card]
KTK 06: [card]Rakshasa’s Secret[/card]
KTK 07: [card]Savage Punch[/card]
KTK 08: [card]Smite the Monstrous[/card]
KTK 09: [card]Scion of Glaciers[/card]
KTK 10: [card]Act of Treason[/card]
KTK 11: [card]Smoke Teller[/card]
KTK 12: [card]Feed the Clan[/card]
KTK 13: [card]Naturalize[/card]
KTK 14: [card]Dragon Grip[/card]
KTK 15: [card]Mountain[/card]
Fate Reforged: 5/15 (33.3% of pack used)
FRF 01: [card]Pyrotechnics[/card]
FRF 02: [card]Goblin Heelcutter[/card]
FRF 03: [card]Hunt the Weak[/card]
FRF 04: [card]Abzan Beastmaster[/card]
FRF 05: [card]Sandsteppe Outcast[/card]
FRF 06: [card]Sultai Emissary[/card]
FRF 07: [card]Douse in Gloom[/card]
FRF 08: [card]Arashin Cleric[/card]
FRF 09: [card]Map the Wastes[/card]
FRF 10: [card]Douse in Gloom[/card]
FRF 11: [card]Rageform[/card]
FRF 12: [card]Pressure Point[/card]
FRF 13: [card]Lightning Shrieker[/card]
FRF 14: [card]Jeskai Runemark[/card]
FRF 15: [card]Defiant Ogre[/card]
Dragons of Tarkir: 7/14 (50% of pack used)
DTK 01: [card]Sprinting Warbrute[/card]
DTK 02: [card]Roast[/card]
DTK 03: [card]Twin Bolt[/card]
DTK 04: [card]Misthoof Kirin[/card]
DTK 05: [card]Sprinting Warbrute[/card]
DTK 06: [card]Tail Slash[/card]
DTK 07: [card]Colossodon Yearling[/card]
DTK 08: [card]Custodian of the Trove[/card]
DTK 09: [card]Tread Upon[/card]
DTK 10: [card]Summit Prowler[/card]
DTK 11: [card]Servant of the Scale[/card]
DTK 12: [card]Taigam’s Strike[/card]
DTK 13: [card]Ancestral Statue[/card]
DTK 14: [card]Learn from the Past[/card]
DTK 15: [card]Plains[/card]
Magic Origins: 5/14 (35.7% of pack used)
ORI 01: [card]Fiery Conclusion[/card]
ORI 02: [card]Ghirapur Gearcrafter[/card]
ORI 03: [card]Titan’s Strength[/card]
ORI 04: [card]Titan’s Strength[/card]
ORI 05: [card]Knightly Valor[/card]
ORI 06: [card]Ampryn Tactician[/card]
ORI 07: [card]Knight of the Pilgrim’s Road[/card]
ORI 08: [card]Smash to Smithereens[/card]
ORI 09: [card]Boggart Brute[/card]
ORI 10: [card]Hitchclaw Recluse[/card]
ORI 11: [card]Reclusive Artificer[/card]
ORI 12: [card]Akroan Jailer[/card]
ORI 13: [card]Ghirapur Aether Grid[/card]
ORI 14: [card]Demolish[/card]
ORI 15: [card]Plains[/card]
Battle for Zendikar: 4/15 (26.7% of pack used)
BFZ 01: [card]Angel of Renewal[/card]
BFZ 02: [card]Touch of the Void[/card]
BFZ 03: [card]Outnumber[/card]
BFZ 04: [card]Cloud Manta[/card]
BFZ 05: [card]Resolute Blademaster[/card]
BFZ 06: [card]Ghostly Sentinel[/card]
BFZ 07: [card]Transgress the Mind[/card]
BFZ 08: [card]Blisterpod[/card]
BFZ 09: [card]Nettle Drone[/card]
BFZ 10: [card]Mountain[/card]
BFZ 11: [card]Swamp[/card]
BFZ 12: [card]Plains[/card]
BFZ 13: [card]Forest[/card]
BFZ 14: [card]Island[/card]
BFZ 15: [card]Mind Raker[/card]
Oath of the Gatewatch: 10/15 (66.7% of pack used)
OGW 01: [card]Timber Gorge[/card]
OGW 02: [card]Mina and Denn, Wildborn[/card]
OGW 03: [card]Holdout Settlement[/card]
OGW 04: [card]General Tazri[/card]
OGW 05: [card]Crumbling Vestige[/card]
OGW 06: [card]Tajuru Pathwarden[/card]
OGW 07: [card]Saddleback Lagac[/card]
OGW 08: [card]Scion Summoner[/card]
OGW 09: [card]Baloth Pup[/card]
OGW 10: [card]Immobilizer Eldrazi[/card]
OGW 11: [card]Call the Gatewatch[/card]
OGW 12: [card]Mountain[/card]
OGW 13: [card]Vines of the Recluse[/card]
OGW 14: [card]Ruin in Their Wake[/card]
OGW 15: [card]Ancient Crab[/card]
Obviously DTK and OGW were great packs for Phil, although he identified FRF’s [card]Pyrotechnics[/card] and [card]Goblin Heelcutter[/card] as the all-star performers in his deck. He ended up with a red-green concoction with a heavy white splash, capable of putting a lot of meat on the table and backing it up with some punishing combat tricks and removal. He defended his odd last few picks of BFZ by saying: “Basically by that point there were no cards that would make my deck any better so I just started drafting lands because they are worth a little.” But how would his deck actually perform in the league finals?
Phil’s Megadraft Matches
Phil’s first opponent was Johnny Mariani, a new player to the league who had done very well for himself throughout the tournament, despite him being seeded at the lowest rung of the top eight.
Johnny was running a black-white Allies/Warriors mash-up, but Phil never really got a sense of what the deck could do, since the match was characterized by a series of mulligans. The first game was especially unfortunate, since Johnny “mulled to 5, into me dropping a [card]Resolute Blademaster[/card] to give my 4/2 creature double strike… when it went unblocked, I used 2 [card]Titan’s Strength[/card] to hit him for 20 from 17 life.” A bad beats story for Johnny’s first league finals, no doubt about it!
In Round 2, Phil was paired against his old league nemesis, Edward Cho. As a special bonus for these finals, both players got to add a free ‘Reward Pack’ of OGW to bolster their decks between rounds. Edward had previously come in at second place during BFZ league, losing to Phil in the finals. This was Ed’s big chance for payback, and he took game one down quickly, playing “an extremely fast 22-land red-white beatdown deck”. However, in game two Ed was mana flooded, and in game three he was mana deprived, so Phil was able to dispatch him with relative ease, and proceed to the finals.
In the final round, Phil played Diego Santos, another tough league regular who had put together a “Sultai morph/durdle deck” in the Megadraft. With two reward packs a piece augmenting their card pools, each player was tooled up for their dramatic face-off. In Phil’s words, game one was “a classic game where a lack of removal on his end, combined with slightly bigger creatures on my end, allowed me to grind out a slight advantage with each passing turn.” Game two looked better for Diego, as Phil kept a one-land hand on a mulligan to five. Miraculously, however, Phil drew into five lands in a row, which allowed him to curve out beautifully: “3-drop, into 4-drop, into [card]Pyrotechnics[/card] to kill both of his creatures, into [card]Angel of Renewal[/card]. Unfortunately for Diego, most of his removal that game was bounce, and as such I was able to slowly take over the game again with three 5-power creatures on the ground, and [card]Angel of Renewal[/card] forcing disadvantageous blocks on his part.” And with that, Phil concluded six weeks of effort to win his second league finals.
To Be Continued…
Once again, congratulations are due to Phil Martin for his second consecutive league win, first in field of 37 players, and again in a field of 22 players. Players in the upcoming SOI league will have to deal with Phil for a third time, as he claims he “will definitely be participating in the next league, unless something unlikely prevents me.” However, there are big changes in store for the SOI league rules, so everyone will have to adopt new strategies if they hope to be successful in it. In the next Yorke on Games, I’ll carefully explain everything that’s going to be changing for SOI league, and the reasons behind those changes.