October 27th 2015 – The Beginning
Its slightly around 6 weeks to go for the 2015 World Magic Cup in beautiful Barcelona, Spain and once again I’m sitting in front of my Macbook trolling various decks and information I can gather as part of the team’s preparation. Back in April 2015 after I just secured my spot for Pro Tour Vancouver via the Regional PTQ, I wrote an article with the following opening note:
Fast forward months later, I’m NOT the Malaysian team captain (its my teammate and travel buddy Raymond Tan) but its still a great honor to battle for our country in Magic’s greatest international show. This “diary” article is to give insight to you readers, whom I believe are all aspiring national team competitors, an insight of what goes behind the scenes leading up to the actual event and some coverage later on. My takeaway from writing this article is to inspire and to give you all a feel on our preparation, which is beyond your typical sleeve-and-shuffle-up Friday Night Magic and PPTQs decks.
But before I start boring everyone with technical Magic the Gathering stuff, here is my take (and some useful tips) on team logistics for 2016.
Flights
If you are qualified for a Pro Tour – advance congratulations to you! You get the special invite to play and a free airfare to the Pro Tour destination (lets use Barcelona as an example). Let’s breakdown what does this free airfare cover:
- Economy flight from your home city (or any major city you happen to be in) to Barcelona
- Economy flight from Barcelona to any other major city of your choice
- Does not cover ground transport
So its kind of cool that Wizards does not restrict you of booking from your place of origin (eg Kuala Lumpur) and also your final destination. So you could effectively travel on your own to GP Kobe, spend a week in Osaka and have Wizards book your flight from Osaka to Barcelona then return to Kuala Lumpur.
But sometimes when you are travelling as a group, or with your spouse, you:
1) Don’t get the airline or timing that you want
2) Don’t get to sit together
3) Can’t upgrade etc.
So normally I opt for the Travel Equivalency Award (TEA) and what it does is Wizards calculates and amount of reimbursement to pay you instead of doing all the bookings for you. That way, you get the airline, flight time, class, seatings etc all at your own discretion. The catch? You don’t get your money until 4-6 weeks after you have attended the PT. But so far it has been working well in my favor. An example with my recent PT Vancouver trip:
Economy Flight (via Cathay Pacific) KL to YVR = Approx RM5,300 per person
Wizards TEA = USD1,590 approx RM5,500 at that time. Wizards TEA when received in September (at a higher USD rate) = RM6,200.
Dev opted for Wizards to book his flights, got on to China Southern (which he said was comfortable) but I got to fly with Cathay, pay with my credit card (to get some more points/cash rebate), get my airline miles, nice timing (Dev got a long 8 hour layover to my 4) and extra cash in my pocket to spend in Canada.
Accommodation
When travelling as a team, Decards boys love their apartments. It helps bonding and team building but the noise, chatter, snoring, hygiene (gulp!) can sometimes get on your nerves. Apartment that is too cramp makes you wish you opted for individual rooms and too large can be rather expensive. But the upside of the testing group being holed up together, with lots of food, drinks and trash talking to go around, certainly outweighs the bad. It was like the good old times, but unlike 12-15 years ago when I was student, I can actually afford my own bed now (those days we have 6 people jammed in a double room, 3 huddled up on a queen size bed, 2 on the floor and another in the bathtub). For this WMC, I wasn’t holding anything back and got us the nicest (and also conveniently located) place I could find within our budget.
This apartment wasn’t an easy find, but if you’re a savvy traveller, scouring the WWW for great value goes a long way to lift your (and your team’s) spirits before an important weekend of MTG. Am certainly looking forward to this one!
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Format 1 – Team Unified Standard
This form of Team Constructed follows the general restrictions of Standard Format in relation to card legality and deck construction with the added restriction that a maximum of four of any card (except basic lands) may be used in the combined pool (main deck and sideboard) of all team members' libraries.
The deck format conforms to all other basics for Constructed rules:
• Minimum of 60 cards per deck
• No maximum deck size, as long as the player can shuffle the deck unassisted
• Up to 15 cards per sideboard
In a nutshell, three standard decks for three players. Maximum four of each card across the three players. Easy peasy!!!
Or so you think….
Challenge #1 – Understanding Fetch Lands
Many of you are probably well seasoned into Battle For Zendikar (BFZ) standard. We are indeed spoiled for BFZ Battle-lands and Khans of Tarkir’s (KTK) fetch-lands as we jam in as many colours as we can calling our decks – Jeskai Black, Abzan Blue, Temur-White, Sultai-Red etc etc…. And even better, we have this 2 cost COLOURLESS artifact monster called Hangarback Walkers to fill in all the off-colour gaps. Magic is such a wonderful game today.
Now take a step back. We need THREE solid decks, not one. One match win wont get it done. You need at least two.
“That’s all cool. Let’s just split up the fetches among the 3 decks!!!”
“Hangarback Walker? I’m sure not every deck needs Hangarback’s right?”
Take a look at this table.
Of course not every deck needs eight to twelve KTK fetches. There are certain version of Black-White Warriors or Mono Red Aggro which runs close to zero fetch-lands but these decks are far from Top Tier. Try that mono red and see how you get eaten by fierce Deathmist Raptors or brick-walled by Jeskai’s Tasigur. Not pleasant but it was an exercise I had to put to the test.
Challenge #2 – Understanding Metagame
When preparing for any event, I’m pretty sure you guys get together with your team of buddies and discuss the potential metagame. You identify Mono red, Abzan, Megamorph etc etc and you tailor you maindeck and/or sideboard accordingly to combat the meta. Sometimes the 4th Surge of Righteousness in your sideboard over a 2nd Valorous Stance can be the difference between winning and losing in a heavy Red Aggro metagame.
From experience, we all know that for example, a Red Aggro metagame does not mean you are bound to meet red every match, but it’s a high chance that you probably bump into more than one along the way. With that, sometimes you can confidently tuck the matchup into your pocket as a win even before the match starts barring any unforeseen mana / mulligan issues solely on the fact that how well your deck is positioned for the metagame.
Preparing for WMC is no different as there is surely a metagame. But we’re not meta-gaming against one or two decks, we’ll be meta-gaming against combination of decks. Take for example if we figured the metagame to have the most popular combination of Esper, Mono Red and Abzan, all our three decks should be tuned to fight this meta. But then again, Magic is such a way that you have to normally surrender one matchup, be it either the aggro, control or midrange. So say if on our team I was the Esper pilot I would love to meet Abzan’s all day long and hope to miss out on the red and blue mages.
However, Magic is such a cruel game that only thing is certain is that your life starts at 20 and you are dead at zero. Everything else is random. Hence especially for WMC, to zone in on a specific matchup, which again is part of a subset of a team’s combination of decks, it’s just not possible to leave it to chance. So already facing the challenge of KTK fetches above, the combination of decks needs to address the “lottery” of potentially polar opposite matchups or great matchups the entire day.
Challenge #3 – Understanding your team
When Syed Joyicho won WMCQ #1, it was a blessing and a curse to the Malaysian team. We had the country’s top Red Mage. Syed’s natural instinct with fire and thirst for blood of his opponents make him the ultimate Red predator, an asset to any team. But Team Unified Constructed sometimes don’t always go the way you want and we need to be very careful when allocating and balancing the team’s resources. As much as you all want to see Syed smash face on camera with Monastery Swiftspear + Become Immense, but ultimately Swiftspear itself may actually sit out the entire tournament all together and you may find Syed steadily demonstrating his hidden “Control” nature.
It’s a fine balancing act of taking each individual skillsets and try mashing up with deck construction constraints. Hence its important that every MTG player, not just the ones attending the WMC, can be flexible in shifting outside their respective comfort zones. I can safely say it with six weeks to go to WMC, preparing for an individual pro tour is actually three times easier than this.
Challenge #4 – Understanding Formations
Formations are positioning of where each team member sits – Seat A, B and C. Seems very trivial or automatic that perhaps to have your best player sit in the middle (ie Seat B) so he can technically “watch over” his wing players. But if you study formations in the past WMCs its much more than that. Metagame plays a role in your formation of where you are trying to correctly “guess” what your opponents would be fielding in the respective seats and place your best matchups there. It may seem like a random guessing game, but there is some logic and merit to it.
Take last year’s Malaysian WMC crew as an example. Joe Soh took the middle seat and predicted that the team’s top players would likely play the best deck on the team ie Abzan Whip. The grindy and tap-out nature of Abzan Whip also allows the games to go longer which gives the pilot extra minutes to look over his/her shoulders to his/her teammates. So naturally you would want the Abzan Whip player to sit in the middle to be able to also watch over the wing players. The Malaysian team went one level ahead and placed their Blue Black Control deck in the middle effectively negating Abzan Whips raw power. At the same time, playing UB control (where most of their turns was draw, land, go) gave Joe plenty of time to watch over Johan and Raymond, so it worked out perfectly for Team Malaysia as they went unscathed in the constructed portion.
End of Part 1
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