Dissecting the Pro Tour and Regionals!

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Newsletter
Thursday, February 9th

The Pro Tour had some definitive results, but a number of players are already getting to work on scrapping Mardu Vehicles! Can it be done? Was Pro Tour Aether Revolt just one event? Or is this deck going to win several marquee Standard events? Regardless of whether you're jumping onboard Vehicles, preparing the deck that will scrap it, or you want to take a break and enjoy some Modern now that the Regional Championships results have poured in from all over, StarCityGames.com has everything you need! And don't forget to assemble your squad for next weekend at the Constructed Team Open in Baltimore! May the best team conquer!

— Danny West, Content Coordinator

Modern Regional Championships results!

Playstyles Of The Rich And Famous
By Sam Black  

While testing for #PTAER, I was playing Matt Nass's Saheeli Aetherworks deck on Magic Online. It took him talking through what I should be doing for roughly five minutes to realize that he was much better at playing the deck than I was, and that he thought about it completely differently.

I saw a deck full of ways to blink and copy value creatures that was looking to grind an opponent out until they were forced into a place where they had to put themselves out of position, and then I could force through the combo. Matt Nass saw a combo deck with a lot of card draw, redundancy and filtering that had tricky lines to combo as quickly as possible. He was always looking at how he could finalize his next batch of energy to maximize his Aetherworks Marvel activations and which combinations of cards he could hit to kill his opponent at any moment.

To put it in terms of chess, I was looking for all the ways I could find to go up a piece, and he was always looking at how many moves away he was from checkmate.

http://www.starcitygames.com/events/180217_baltimore_fact_sheet.html

February 25-26
Modern

March 11-12
Modern

March 24-26
KLD/AER Limited

The Dangers Of Banning Standard Magic Cards
By Jeff Cunningham  

Constructed Magic is a history of overpowered, warping, and "unfun" cards, generally considered to represent design oversights. These cards are naturally exploited and brought to the top of their respective formats. But Magic is fun not only when it meets a projected ideal of perfect diversity, parity, and interactivity, but when boundaries take form that both limit deckbuilding options and provide the unique conditions for breaking them to the fullest degree. Similarly, deckbuilding can be exciting not only when a format is brand-new—before entire categories of decks are pushed out by established powerhouses—but after this has already happened and solutions require subtle investigation into unusual spaces.

I thought Mike Flores put it well in last week's Top Level Podcast:

Mike Flores: I didn't find [Smuggler's Copter] to be offensive. Like, if that was the best card in Standard, I'm all right with that. I'm all right with playing against Jitte too. You create paradigms, and can develop decks around the existence some of these things, and it's rewarding to develop some of those things, and it's rewarding to use "the weapons of the enemy" in a new and different way in order to blunt the incentives of others, and to realize new and different synergies. And I think the emergence of some of these Prized Amalgam decks, and some of these Scrapheap Scrounger decks that weren't traditionally on-color, I thought those were very interesting and largely enabled by Smuggler's Copter.

Mike also gave an interesting example of a deck created at the end of the pre-bannings format that showcased what he means: a G/W Aetherworks deck using eight Wrath effects—an unusually high number for Constructed—since they match so well against Emrakul's effect.

Now, Chapin's reply in this exchange was also persuasive—that this kind of problem-solving is enjoyable especially for deeply enfranchised players and may be too difficult or technical for everyone. But the point here isn't that this is the only kind of pleasure Magic offers or that it should go unchecked, but just that aggressive Standard banning can hedge out a particularly subtle, interesting, and rewarding kind of problem-solving.

The Defining Aspects Of Aether Revolt Standard
By Ari Lax  

A common theme in our testing was extremely variable results. Two ten-game sets would easily have opposite extreme results. This wasn't a reflection on player skill, as we had people swapping decks in sets. This wasn't a reflection on list differences, as we all used the same lists. We weren't the only team with this experience. The games were just that swingy.

Toolcraft Exemplar into Heart of Kiran is basically unbeatable. Merely curving Thraben Inspector into Veteran Motorist on the other hand is just not a real thing, or just drawing multiple Heart of Kirans or too many Vehicles and not enough non-Scrapheap Scrounger creatures. Even just the mana in the Mardu deck is a liability, with three or four colors of spells and needing to play specific colors on Turn 1 with cards like Spire of Industry in your deck that can be totally hit-or-miss.

The point I'm trying to make is the difference between the best hands in the format and the medium or slightly-below-average ones is drastic. The decks being played are extremely powerful in slightly inconsistent ways.