Testing for a Pro Tour is a unique experience. I have only played in 5 Pro Tours now, but each of them has been a completely different experience in regards to testing and the group that I was working with.

For my first Pro Tour, Philadelphia, I shared a hotel room with Justin Richardson, Pascal Maynard, and Marcel Angelo Zafra. While we had a forum for discussing decks with other qualified Canadians, we really didn’t use it that much and were mainly in a separate group, mainly testing by ourselves. Worlds 2011, David Caplan, Dan Lanthier, Noah Long, Marc Anderson, and I all tested together, and were met with a fair amount of success, with Caplan making the top 4, Marc the top 16, and me the top 64. Both Marc and Caplan had been very satisfied with the small testing group, though Noah and I had found it too small.

Hawaii was the first Pro Tour where a large contingent of Canadians was qualified. Thanks in large part to Mana Deprived, most of the people qualified were sharing a beach house and testing together. I was amazed at how quickly we could get things done, and how seemingly in moments, different decks would be built, and various cards could be tested in multiple match ups simultaneously, saving on precious time. However, the lack of communication caused by having such a large group, and the unreliability of testing results from small contingents who would separate caused last minute problems, and despite having come up with basically every good deck from the tournament, none of us did very well.

Barcelona was similar, except we tried to communicate more and spend less time separating into small groups. I found it fairly effective, but again, others had problems with the size of the group. They felt that by including all qualified individuals, we were diluting our player quality and therefore our testing results would be skewed due to play skill differences between different deck pilots. Most of the initial work had been done by Caplan and I during 2 weeks alone, though the drafts were extremely informative, and for that reason alone we decided that we would need to have a larger group.

For Pro Tour Seattle, all that changed. After winning Barcelona, more people were interested in testing with our squad. After talking to some interested parties, we managed to acquire both Tzu Ching Kuo and Hao-Shan Huang to our team. They, as well as Marc Anderson, Lucas Siow, Pascal Maynard, Jon Stern, and myself were our group for Seattle. We wanted to keep the group small, and everyone who was committed understood this. Like a deck for a tournament, we continue to tune our testing team size and procedure until we finally get it to where we want it to be. I think there are really 4 essential kind of people on a playtest group, and you definitely want multiples of each.

The Creator: This guy (or gal) comes up with the wacky ideas to form new decks. They take things they see and improve on the concepts to make better concepts, and to potentially “break” formats. For there to be a lightbulb, someone has to think of having one first, even if they don’t know how to build the best lightbulb.

The Tuner: This is the next factory line worker. After a deck concept has been created, and it has been shown that there is some merit to it (for instance, a Wall of Omens/Doomed Traveller tokens deck in Modern may be a new idea, but it clearly isn’t any good), then the Tuner keeps making minor changes to improve it. Kind of like cutting a Diamond to make it shine.

The Organizer: This is the overseer of the work going into the deck. Often, this is the realist who says when too much time has been wasted in a brew and it is time to move on. This person usually tracks results and makes sure the team as a whole is on track to getting to the best deck, whether it is a known deck or not.

The Playtester: This person is willing to just jam games. They don’t care if they hate the deck they are testing, or even if they have absolutely 0 interest in playing it. They will play it as well as possible, try various sideboarding options, and always try to win even if they would prefer that the brew they are battling against wins. While a lot of the effort and glamour goes to the deck creators and tuners, the playtesters are just as valuable, putting tons of time into understanding how a deck functions in the real world and how different matchups play out.

If you have all 4 of these people on your team, you should be set. As long as you can still draft, of course (spoiler alert: Our whole team did fairly poorly in draft).

We built a bunch of decks and mashed them against each other. At one point, we decided to have a mock tourney, with each player piloting a different deck (except with 2 Jund decks, since we expected it to be a major player at the PT). The deck that impressed me the most was this list of Blue Affinity (or Robots, if you will) that we had found online, being played by PureWhiteSaito. Some speculation began to whether this really was Saito (spoiler: it’s not), but the list itself was very good. After playing many post-board games, we figured that some sideboard cards were suboptimal, and that we wanted 4 [card]Arcbound Ravager[/card] and 3 [card]Steel Overseer[/card] rather than the original configuration of 3 and 4, because Ravager was much, much better in the post board games and against Jund.

4 [card]Ornithopter[/card]

4 [card]Memnite[/card]

4 [card]Springleaf Drum[/card]

4 [card]Mox Opal[/card]

4 [card]Vault Skirge[/card]

4 [card]Signal Pest[/card]

4 [card]Thoughtcast[/card]

4 [card]Cranial Plating[/card]

4 [card]Arcbound Ravager[/card]

3 [card]Master of Etherium[/card]

3 [card]Steel Overseer[/card]

2 [card]Welding Jar[/card]

4 [card]Inkmoth Nexus[/card]

4 [card]Blinkmoth Nexus[/card]

4 [card]Darksteel Citadel[/card]

2 [card]Glimmervoid[/card]

2 [card]Island[/card]

Sideboard

2 [card]Thoughtseize[/card]

3 [card]Dismember[/card]

2 [card]Relic of Progenitus[/card]

1 [card]Grafdigger’s Cage[/card]

1 [card]Negate[/card]

4 [card]Etched Champion[/card]

2 [card]Ancient Grudge[/card]

What I liked about this deck was that it was fast enough to beat the unfair decks, with a fair number of turn 3 kills, and that you could grind out wins against the fair decks with powerful ‘gas’ cards like [card]Cranial Plating[/card], Ravager, or even just by man-land evasive beatdown. This was not my first time playing with the artifact aggro deck, but the previous incarnations I had played with were red. [card]Thoughtcast[/card] and Master added extra gas to the deck, and smoothed out the draws. Mulligans to 5 or below would often win, and top deck wars became much more favourable. Of course, you lost the ability to kill creatures or go to the dome after they begin to stabilize, but instead of drawing a [card]Galvanic Blast[/card] when they were at 16, you now have 2 more, generally, artifacts. [card]Dismember[/card] in the sideboard was a nod to those creatures that must die, mainly [card]Restoration Angel[/card]s and [card]Grim Lavamancer[/card]s.

The reason that most decks in Modern pack large quantities of artifact hate is because this deck is generally the aggressor. It must be answered. You want to be racing with this deck in most situations, and forcing them to answer your threats. Game 1 situations are much different from post-sideboard, since often Game 1 they are helpless to your plan and a good draw can just run them over with little to no resistance. After sideboard, [card]Etched Champion[/card] comes in! He sure shows why he is the Champ, beating almost all the hate being played (such as [card]Ancient Grudge[/card] or [card]Stony Silence[/card]). Most decks don’t really have an answer to him, and your other threats you want to slow roll as much as possible, making sure that you can get at least 1 hit in with a Plating, for example, or having a Ravager that when it dies will donate its organs to another creature.

The tournament itself was quite the experience, and not entirely in a good way. Of course, it is unlikely I will ever feel as good about a tournament as I did about Barcelona, but each one holds its own attractions.

I woke up, and listened to my Tournament mix, including “You’re the Best Around” from the original Karate Kid (sorry Jackie Chan), Eye of the Tiger, and Titanium, as well as the song I listened to on repeat to calm myself before my match against Finkel in Barcelona, “Fighter” by Christina Aguliera. Gotta get pumped up.

It was the morning of Friday at PT Return to Ravnica in Seattle, or PT “Prisoners of War”, as the event site was a warehouse by the docks, distanced from normal human beings, with the only real way to leave being to wait for the shuttles that seemed to only be there for 40 people every 45 minutes. There was an unpleasant evening when about 150 people were waiting outside in the rain, knowing that only 40 of them would get on the shuttle. I asserted my dominance over the herd by making sure that I was one of those 40, which was much more difficult than I imaged considering when the bus arrived that I was at the front of the line. Many pushes backwards by cold and wet colleagues caused me to barely make it on.

My first round ended in a draw. This was cause for much amusement to other people who knew what I was playing, but the affinity mirror is such a grind! Game 1 I lost the roll, and he played guys and turn 2 [card]Steel Overseer[/card], and I actually made a game of it before succumbing to his superior air force. Game 2 I drew a sideboard Grudge and destroyed him, and Game 3 we both drew Grudges and the game went on for quite some time, with both of us unable to attack due to Nexuses (Nexi?).

Round 2 I had a fairly easy win against what seemed to be a Dredgevine deck. He never really did anything that could compete with my fliers in either game.

Round 3 was against eventual top 8er and friend, Eduardo Sajgalik. He was sporting UW, and due to him observing some subterfuge at the dealer tables in which I purchased some [card]Pestermite[/card]s for a friend, he believed I was playing [card]Splinter Twin[/card]. Alas, I lost the all important game 1, but I managed to battle back against turn 2 [card]Stony Silence[/card] in game 2 and his abundance of Paths in game 3 due to his mana problems.

Round 4 I picked up my first loss against another eventual top8er, Wily Edel, playing Jund. Game 1 I mulled to 5, and definitely could have won the game if I had been more aggressive in making a large Nexus with my Ravager when he was tapped out, and hoping he didn’t have the [card]Terminate[/card] or lethal damage for the next 2 turns. Game 2 I won fairly easily, but Game 3 I was rightfully punished for my Game 1 punt by him drawing both his [card]Rakdos Charm[/card]s and both his [card]Ancient Grudge[/card]s to supplement his [card]Jund Charm[/card]s.

One of my favourite games was round 5, when my turn 1 was [card]Memnite[/card], [card]Vault Skirge[/card], go off of a [card]Blinkmoth Nexus[/card]. My opponent, on his turn, plays [card]Path to Exile[/card] on my [card]Vault Skirge[/card], and I search for an [card]Island[/card]. I untap, play [card]Darksteel Citadel[/card], play [card]Cranial Plating[/card], equip it to [card]Memnite[/card], and swing.

I end up winning that game, and my opponent says “I guess that’s why you play affinity, for explosive starts like that, with turn 2 plating + equip while I am tapped out”

Of course, I played and equipped it turn 2 because he Pathed on his main phase. And he was tapped out because, well, he patched on his main phase. Funny how these things work out.

After that squeaker of a match, I was 3-1-1 going into the drafts. Not where I would like to be, but I have battled back from worse. I drafted what I felt was a pretty sweet Rakdos deck, splashing [card]Teleportal[/card]. I had the same experience that one often does when playing aggro decks, in that my first 2 rounds of the draft, against Tzu Ching Kuo and Ari Lax respectively, there were 4-5 turn windows where I had around 7-8 outs to outright win the game, but they never came and I lost. Sometimes that’s just what happens in Magic, I just prefer when it happens to my opponents 🙂

I was then 3-3-1, needing a win to make day 2, and luckily I managed to pull one out with a deck that just as easily could have been 3-0.

After a quick dinner, and an almost quicker sleep, it was time to draft again. This time, I drafted a pretty solid Golgari/Selesnya deck, that began with picking Guildgates out of awful packs, and getting rewarded with the additional flexibility for switching colours that they provide. I won my first 2 matches, one almost solely off of [card]Loxodon Smiter[/card] against my opponent’s triple [card]Annihilating Fire[/card], 5+ counter spell deck, at least 3 0/4 wall deck. Yeah, he was just cold to that card.

Once again, in the finals of the draft, I was against Eduardo Sajgalik. We made a pact that whoever won would top 8 (and at least he honoured his end), and despite a couple points in an otherwise unloseable game 1 where some loose attacks by him gave me the chance to triple-runner him to win, I only double-runner-ed. Game 2 was fairly cut and dried, and his superior deck played 2 [card]Stab Wound[/card]s on my creatures, and I slowly bled to death.

It was rare for me to feel more comfortable leaving the draft rounds, but for this Pro Tour it was the case. I picked up a quick win in round 12 before losing to Raphael Levy’s Dredgevine deck in a hard fought 3 game match, where he remarked one game “It’s turn 2, and there are 20 permanents in play!”. Was quite funny.

Round 13 was the only round I was close to getting tilted at all. Both games my opponent won, he played turn 2 [card]Glimpse the Unthinkable[/card], milling Grislebrand (of course), and turn 3 [card]Goryo’s Vengeance[/card], attacking into my [card]Ornithopter[/card], then casting [card]Fury of the Horde[/card] 4 times to kill me from my above 21 life. Was not a fun experience.

Round 14 I beat Jund, just like it happened in testing, and then I was playing round 15 for a Pro Point.

Game 1 I punted by casting a [card]Thoughtcast[/card] that didn’t change my clock, but changed his by making his future 3 Goyfs see a sorcery in the yard, and I lost the game due to this misplay.

Game 2 He played a turn 2 [card]Qasali Pridemage[/card], and on my turn 3 I killed him.

Game 3 He played a Spanish [card]Damping Matrix[/card], which I had to get the Oracle text on. Thankfully I could still tap all my stuff for mana, though my Ravager was very unimpressive. My [card]Signal Pest[/card], however, did good work, and I found it kind of ironic that his [card]Qasali Pridemage[/card]s were shut down, and I managed to take the match.

While I was the best performer from our testing group, many other Canadians and Mana Deprived allies did well, such as Miguel Gatica, Maksym Gryn, Sebastian Denno, who all made the top 16, and Noah Long and Anthony Berlingeri, who both cashed. I continue to be impressed and amazed at how Canadian Magic is growing, and the number of Mana Deprived shirts I see at events continues to astonish and please me. Thank you all for continuing to support what we are trying to do here, and I really think that Canada is becoming a force on the world stage.

See you all in Montreal, where I try to continue to win every non-US PT that I play in!