At Game Day I played Slivers, got top 8, and promptly got wrecked by WU Control. In the middle of game 1 I realized that the sideboard card I couldn't remember the night before was Slaughter Games, which would have been the perfect solution to D-Sphere. Have you ever too lately realized an obviously perfect sideboard card?

Oh, do I have a story for you.

For Pro Tour San Juan, me and several other pro players (Conley Woods, Ari Lax, Craig Wescoe, Kyle Boggemes… the list goes on) stayed in a beach house for the week leading up the the Pro Tour.

There are so many good stories from that week, and it was probably one of the most fun weeks of my life: every day we woke up, were near the beach in a foreign country, and played tons of Magic. I even became (un)official Team Mom, making everybody food, using my computer to run mock tournaments because it had the software, and so on.

The format was Zendikar Block Constructed, meaning everybody was looking for an edge despite all of the decks looking similar. Jace ruled the roost, and you had to be blisteringly fast with your creature decks to stand a chance against the decks that were ramping into Eldrazi or completely controlling the game.

One night just a couple days before the event, I was browsing Magic Online decklists and came across a blue-green decklist that was way different than anything we had tried. It had Lotus Cobra, Jace, Vengevine, Joraga Treespeaker, Wolfbriar Elemental and - the real all star card Unified Will. (I’ll put the final decklist at the end of this writeup.)

Ari Lax would later describe this deck as follows: “In retrospect, it makes sense this was one of the best decks in the format. It had Jace, it had the fastest ways to play Jace, and it had the best creature answer to Jace in Vengevine.”

I immediately built it up and started testing it, and it started doing impressively. Though we were running low on testing time, I got on board with the deck almost right away, and others similarly started hopping on the blue-green train.

We were happy with basically all of our matchups except for one: Mono Red. Though we weren’t expecting a ton of it at the Pro Tour, it was just a nightmare. Their creatures were cheaper than ours, started attacking quicker than ours, and we couldn’t effectively answer them. They had the burn to finish us off. But the real problem was one particular creature: Cunning Sparkmage.

Cunning Sparkmage killed off all our Lotus Cobras, Nest Invader tokens, River Boas, and unleveled Joraga Treespeakers. It pinged us to death. It had haste, so bouncing it with Jace didn’t help much. It was a huge issue. And we didn’t have any good answers.

We went in knowing this. We looked to try and find an answer, but couldn’t.

Now, you might think you know where this story is going. But let me continue.

The night before the Pro Tour, I met up with (now fellow R&D member) Ben Hayes. It was his first Pro Tour, and young Ben had no idea what deck to play. I didn’t know him well, but I also didn’t want to leave him out in the cold. So, when he asked for a deck, after much consternation and knowing my house would probably yell at me later, I gave him the decklist. He went back to build it, and I went back to our house.

That night, we were doing one final pass through Gatherer to see if we could find anything to fight off Cunning Sparkmage. As Vidianto Wijaya scrolled lazily through the cards, out of nowhere I suddenly yelled “STOP!”

There it was, hanging from the upper left hand corner of the browser bar like some kind of ripe fruit waiting to be plucked. My eyes went full on Loony Tunes with excitement.

How could we have all missed it? How could we have missed our deck’s salvation? The perfect card: Paralyzing Grasp.

All you had to do was put it on a Sparkmage, and you could effectively lock it down. It could either kill itself in response or stay tapped forever. It cost one less mana than Domestication so it came down at the right time (instead of costing four mana, which the pesky Sparkmage would stop by shooting our one toughness mana creature) and could also hit their other creatures like Kargan Dragonlord and Plated Geopede. It was just what we were looking for!

Me and my compadres literally danced around the room like a mix of Renaissance court jesters and some kind of sombrero-wearing Spanish mariachi band shouting “PARALYZING GRASP! PARALYZING GRASP!” over and over, as if the empty air hanging in the universe somehow cared at all about this Magic card we had just found.

Had a psychiatric professional seen us at that point, he would have had quite the evaluation.

Without testing, we slotted two into the sideboard. I called up Ben, eager with excitement, and keying off of our excitement he also put two copies into his sideboard. Everybody was ecstatic. The group of us playing the deck all went to bed that night secure in two things: that we were about to play in a Pro Tour, and that we all had a great sideboard for it.

Flash forward to the next day.

Here it is. The big day. The big show.

Round one pairings go up. He wins the roll. Turn one Mountain, Goblin Guide.

Oh no. Here it goes.

I lose game one. Game two I narrowly win. Game three, I draw two Paralyzing Grasps… and I die holding both of them as his quick creatures and burn spells take me out.

This would begin a running theme for the day.

I played against Mono Red three times, losing each time and defeating everybody else, and each time lamenting that I had Paralyzing Grasp in my deck.

In the end, our matchup against Mono Red and a bad run of pairings did the people playing that deck from my house in. It was tough to see after all of those hours preparing.

I mean what were we thinking? Paralyzing Grasp?!? Get real. How did we all collectively decide this was a good idea?

We bemoaned our fate from the sidelines. But that was not the fate of young Ben Hayes.

Ben went 10-0. Ben played against ten non-Mono Red decks. Ben never had to sideboard in Paralyzing Grasp. And, perhaps most important of all, he never had to suffer the agony of dying with Paralyzing Grasp in his hand in the constructed portion of a Pro Tour.

And that’s the story of how a constructed deck containing Paralyzing Grasp made 11th place and $6,000 at the Pro Tour.

That is also the story of how, going back to the original question, I would have had literally rather anything else in my sideboard than Paralyzing Grasp. If I could go back, I would have rather put my Panera Bread rewards card and a four of spades in my sideboard instead.

The moral of the story: don’t play Paralyzing Grasp in constructed.

Decklist, for posterity:

6 Forest

5 Island

1 Evolving Wilds

3 Khalni Garden

4 Misty Rainforest

2 Scalding Tarn

4 Verdant Catacombs

4 Joraga Treespeaker

4 Lotus Cobra

4 Nest Invader

3 River Boa

4 Vengevine

4 Wolfbriar Elemental

4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

4 Unified Will

2 Eldrazi Monument

2 Into the Roil

Sideboard:

1 Pelakka Wurm

2 Tajuru Preserver

4 Narcolepsy

2 Paralyzing Grasp :(

3 Vapor Snare

3 Deprive