I played my first Pro Tour this past weekend in Las Vegas, and the experience was beyond anything I expected. I finished 19th with an 11-5 record on the weekend: 4-2 in draft, 7-3 in constructed. Along the way, I lost my win-and-in for Worlds. It’s hard to complain about a finish like that, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least a little disappointed not to get there in the last match.
The competition was the best I’ve ever faced: RC and Spotlight winners, Pro Tour winners, and a former World Champion. But instead of starting there, I want to go back to the very beginning of this run, where the dream honestly started with something of a meme.
A Hope and a Dreamdew Entrancer
Right before my partner and I left for a two-month trip to Asia, we registered for the NRG Series Team Trios event at the beginning of November with our friend David. The event was in a suburb of Chicago, so it was easy to get to, and we figured it would be a good time either way.
My partner played Mono-Red in Standard, before the Screaming Nemesis ban. I played UB Frog in Modern after a friend inspired me to pick up the deck. David, meanwhile, was in the mines playing Spider-Man Sealed. Unfortunately, I punted my face off on Frog for the entire Saturday morning, and we quickly went 1-3, knocking us out of contention for prizes.
David had brought a Modern deck, I had brought a Standard brew, and my partner still had the Mono-Red deck she’d played that morning, so we stuck around to play some ReCQs in the afternoon.
The first thing you should know about me as a Magic player is that I’m not afraid to register cards or decks that other people would call “suboptimal.” Some of my earliest competitive experiences, back when WotC was taking baby steps toward the Magic Spotlight Series after COVID, were with a Grixis Midrange-slash-combo homebrew featuring Hidetsugu and Kairi and Push // Pull in Standard around March of the Machine. The deck was even featured in this Frank Karsten article.
During the ensuing Pioneer RCQ season, I spent an absurd amount of time daydreaming about and testing an Azorius build of Nine Lives donation in a metagame dominated by Amalia Combo, Izzet Phoenix, and Rakdos Vampires. I could fill another entire essay with the things I have to say about that deck, and I still regret not being able to bring it to an RC.
Anyway, the deck I brought that day was certainly my own creation. In a Standard format where you were allowed to play cards like Vivi Ornitier, Proft's Eidetic Memory, and Ouroboroid, I decided to register this pile of cards:
The deck heavily supported a blink theme with four copies each of Splash Portal and Hide on the Ceiling. Both were hits off Thundertrap Trainer, and both generated even more value when blinking Thundertrap Trainer or Dreamdew Entrancer, turning them into a build-your-own Ancestral Recall. They could also produce some explosive starts by scamming Quantum Riddler into play: with a turn-one dual land into Llanowar Elves, you could put Riddler into play on turn two with a blue land and Splash Portal.
The scam also worked with Spider-Sense, though you didn’t get your second draw and had to bounce your Llanowar Elves to take that line. In general, Spider-Sense wasn’t just solid interaction; it was also a synergy piece. Bouncing a Thundertrap Trainer or Dreamdew Entrancer for another ETB trigger later felt amazing.
The coolest part of the deck, to me, was the flexibility between the synergy pieces. Hide on the Ceiling and Spider-Sense were both blink or self-bounce enablers, but together they were actually a one-sided wrath: target all of the creatures and artifacts you want to exile with Hide on the Ceiling, then Spider-Sense the delayed trigger that would bring them back.
Tishana's Tidebinder did the same trick when you didn’t have Spider-Sense, countering the return trigger instead. I played games where I had two copies of Hide on the Ceiling in hand and a Tidebinder on board: I would play one Hide targeting my Tidebinder and the other targeting everything I wanted to exile, then order the triggers so Tidebinder came back first and countered the second return trigger.
Dreamdew Entrancer was also an important piece of the deck. If you weren’t under pressure, it could lock down one of your own creatures that you later wanted to bounce with Spider-Sense to draw two. But if you were dying to a large threat, you could just stun it for three turns and buy a huge amount of time.
For finishers, I ended up running two Doppelgang because the deck drew so many cards and often ended up with a lot of mana when it was time to close. There were certainly other options, and I could’ve optimized this part more, but it helped that Doppelgang was findable off Thundertrap Trainer. The sideboard was a bit of everything, though it was mostly geared toward hating on decks with Vivi Ornitier and giving myself enough time against Mono-Red.
To be honest, I didn’t think this deck was close to the best deck in Standard at the time. It was abundantly clear that Vivi-based Izzet decks were objectively the best thing to be doing. That said, I loved the lines you could find with the deck, and I loved that you could play severely underestimated cards like Dreamdew Entrancer and Hide on the Ceiling while still putting up a real fight against the metagame decks.
I also figured that I wouldn’t have a real gameplay edge in the Izzet mirror. I hadn’t played much Standard at that point, and anyone I faced would probably have more reps in those matchups than I did. But by playing this wacky Simic Blink list, I could drag them into the mud on lines that neither of us had much experience with, and maybe I had more experience than they did. This idea of playing a deck you’re comfortable piloting as a way to gain equity will resurface later.
My first match in the ReCQ was against Simic Ouroboroid. It was a decent matchup as long as they didn’t ramp too aggressively. The version they were on played Innkeeper's Talent, which was probably good for me because it made their clock a little slower. I ended up winning 2-0 by assembling the Hide on the Ceiling plus Spider-Sense wrath in both games, eating their entire board and leaving them with very little to do.
My second opponent was piloting the villain deck: Izzet Cauldron. In Game 1, I stabilized and found the Hide on the Ceiling plus Tishana's Tidebinder wrath, which took their Vivi Ornitier, Fear of Missing Out, and Agatha's Soul Cauldron (Hide hits artifacts too). Once I stuck a Quantum Riddler, the game ended quickly.
For Game 2, all of my artifact and enchantment hate came in: Annul, Heritage Reclamation, and Vivien Reid. I had enough answers for his threats, and eventually stuck a Vivien Reid he couldn’t deal with. That engine carried me over the finish line.
Since the ReCQ had just eight people, that put me into the finals, where my opponent already had an invite and scooped to me for prizes. Invite acquired with this pile of cards.
I Really Did Not Want to Play Lessons or Landfall in Milwaukee
Fast-forward a few months. I had a great time in Asia not playing much Magic, aside from a few weekends of Arena Direct, and both TLA and ECL released while I was away. When I arrived back in the US in late January, the Standard metagame had mostly settled around two powerful pillars: Izzet Lessons, with Artist's Talent and Monument to Endurance, and Simic Cub, with Badgermole Cub and Nature's Rhythm. There were also some Four-Color Elementals and Izzet Spellementals builds floating around from PT ECL, with Sunderflock as a clean answer to Cub.
I had about a month to figure out what to play for RC Milwaukee. I only had one invite, and I didn’t want to fly to Portland just to play LCQs on Friday, so this was the event I had circled. But it crept up on me, and a week out, I still had no idea what I was doing.
I had trialed most of the decks a little on MTGA, but none of them felt particularly good to play. Zevin Faust's Azorius Prison list stood out as interesting (many of my friends commented that it felt very “me,” whatever that means), so I picked up a bunch of the cards a few days before the RC.
After more testing on MTGA, though, I realized there were a lot of small decision points with UW Prison that made it incredibly hard to pilot. The deck also had very little card flow besides a couple copies of Enduring Curiosity, so you really had to maximize the value of every card. Honestly, the list looked fun to pilot in theory, but in practice I thought it would give me way too many chances to misplay and punt games away because of my lack of experience. So I decided against it a couple days before the RC.
At that point, I was confused and didn’t even have many options for acquiring cards before the event. I trawled through decklists on MTGTop8 and MTGGoldfish, looking for any spark of inspiration. After some vigorous digging, I stumbled across the Boros Dragons list that had won the South American RC in Santiago a week or two earlier.
I loaded up the list and played a couple matches on MTGA. I don’t remember how the matches went, but I liked how clean the lines felt. Turn-one Momo into turn-two Clarion Conqueror or Nova Hellkite. Sarkhan making a Treasure to power out a Magmatic Hellkite on turn three. The deck had a lot of openings where the curve felt extremely smooth.
I had no delusions that this was the best deck in the format, but it felt powerful on its nut draws and pretty reasonable after sideboarding, with access to white hate pieces and a lot of card advantage from The Legend of Roku for grindy games.
I also really liked that the deck encouraged you to play spells in your first main phase. Momo, Friendly Flier and Sarkhan, Dragon Ascendant both get pumped when your dragons enter, so you’re almost always playing creatures before combat, even when they don’t have haste. That made sequencing more straightforward in many spots, which gave me less latitude to punt.
Beyond the gameplay, I had played a lot of Tarkir: Dragonstorm Limited. I played the Spotlight Series event in Denver and won five collector booster boxes in the Arena Direct. My partner convinced me to crack one or two of them on the basis that they were “free” because I had already won back more than my entry on the others. When I sorted through those cards, I found exactly four mismatched Sarkhan, Dragon Ascendant and more than enough copies of Magmatic Hellkite and Maelstrom of the Spirit Dragon, which meant I already had most of the list lying around.
With most of the cards ready to go, I ended up registering 74 of the 75 cards from João's winning list, substituting one Cavern of Souls for Multiversal Passage. I really dislike Multiversal Passage in general and often felt like I wanted a Cavern of Souls, especially after sideboard against blue decks, so adding the extra Cavern for three total felt natural.
Playing More Standard Than I Signed Up For at RC Milwaukee
Going into the tournament, I felt at ease with the outcome, good or bad. As I told my friends repeatedly that weekend, my goal was actually to “minimize the amount of Standard I would be playing” by registering Boros Dragons. I was genuinely excited to play the Limited Championship Qualifier on Sunday after I inevitably failed to make Day 2. After all, I had played fewer than five matches with the deck entering the tournament, so I had no real expectations.
The day before the event, I played some ECL LCQs for fun and spent time finding the last few cards for the tournament. My friends picked up a single Dragonhawk, Fate's Tempest from The Mana Vault on their way up, and I borrowed a clutch set of Requisition Raids from a friend. Somehow, I found all the cards I needed.
The tournament went much better than expected. I started 6-0 and immediately qualified for Day 2, squashing my dreams of playing the LCQ on Sunday.
I was definitely running hot, but I didn’t feel like I was playing significantly above my usual level. I was, however, playing tight: not throwing games by giving my opponents extra outs, and playing to my own outs when I needed to. I even hit a couple of them. Again, the deck made it easier for me to find the right lines, in part because of the main-phase sequencing incentives I mentioned before.
The other benefit of playing an extremely aggressive deck with no card flow during a long nine-round day was that my rounds were short. I finished every match with around 15 to 20 minutes left on the clock, which gave me plenty of time to decompress, stay hydrated, and even pick up lunch or Gatorade between rounds.
I lost my first round of the day at 6-0 in a tight three-game match against Bant Airbending. The ending sequence left me wondering whether there were ways for me to get there. I recovered quickly afterward and finished the day 8-1.
The strangest part of the entire experience was that I didn’t feel like I was playing beyond myself. It just felt like a good run with good variance. My friends and I had an excellent dinner and a couple rounds of drinks at a nice supper club for some premature celebration, then ended the night playing a little more ECL Arena Direct and goofing around. Some of them even fired a Commander game before we called it a night.
Day 2 started much worse. I lost badly to Four-Color Elementals, barely clenched out a win against Mono-Green Landfall, then got completely destroyed by Izzet Lessons. At 9-3, I was almost dead for Top 8, and even qualifying for the Pro Tour was starting to look difficult.
In the next round, I played against Izzet Spellementals and proceeded to play one of the worst games of Magic I had experienced in a while. In Game 3, my opponent couldn’t find a second land for two turns, but I didn’t have any colored sources to cast my spells, so we just sat there doing nothing for a while. Eventually he found action before I did, dropped a Sunderflock, and I lost the match 2-1.
At 9-4, I thought I was probably dead for Top 32 and a Pro Tour qualification, which felt awful considering how Day 1 had started.
After the deflating round against Spellementals, I stomped Izzet Prowess 2-0. Nova Hellkites pinging off their otters and a Pyroclasm for their Slickshot plus Otter draw is quite devastating. That put me at 10-4 heading into the last round.
At that point, I was hearing some mentions of PT invite passdowns and that there might be a chance depending on tiebreaks, but I had mostly come to terms with the fact that I had blown the start of the day and was roughly out of contention.
But in the last round, I was paired into Dimir Midrange, one of my best matchups. I won 2-0, with my Nova Hellkites doing a lot of work pinging off Floodpits Drowners and Deep-Cavern Bats. When the standings came out, I was in 34th, with more than two passdowns from the Top 32.
I had qualified for the Pro Tour.
Bringing An Old Friend to the Pro Tour
Fast-forward another two months, and the Pro Tour I’d qualified for snuck up on me too. I probably should’ve done a better job budgeting time to test and prepare for these events, but life happens.
Prowess was taking Standard by storm, with a lot of new support from Secrets of Strixhaven: Flow State, and to a lesser degree Prismari Charm and Colorstorm Stallion. After playing through the Horse-plus-Crab variant a few times on MTGA, I felt like I wasn’t going to gain much equity by bringing it to the event. The sequencing wasn’t impossibly hard, but it wasn’t trivial either, and I suspected that more experienced pilots, especially Pro Tour players, would be able to outmaneuver me.
I did spend some time in the kitchen trying to bring something new to the table. In particular, I thought a nonzero amount about making Mana Sculpt work alongside the new Emeritus of Ideation in the Simic Blink shell I’d used to qualify for the RC. Thundertrap Trainer, Tishana's Tidebinder, and Dreamdew Entrancer are all Wizards too, which made Mana Sculpt even more tempting. With all that colorless mana, maybe I could cast an early Doppelgang or Ugin, Eye of the Storms and end the game quickly.
In theory.
In practice, all of that theory fell flat on its face. I lost an embarrassing number of games on the MTGA ladder with Simic Wizards and gave up once I decided I’d suffered enough.
After chatting with a few more people and getting even more dizzy, I talked through my uncertainty around deck choice with my partner. Ever the aggro-deck proponent, her sage advice was simple: “just play Boros Dragons again.”
I mulled it over, then realized I agreed with her. I enjoyed chatting with my friends while Lessons mirrors sweated out the last half-hour of each round. I enjoyed pinging off Otters from Stormchaser's Talent with Nova Hellkite. And honestly, I enjoyed casting a cute Lemur Bat Ally on turn one. After going through the RC together in Milwaukee, the deck felt like an old friend.
I still did some due diligence with new Secrets of Strixhaven cards. Lorehold Charm, Lorehold, the Historian, and even Abrade (mostly as an answer to Resonating Lute) all got trialed in various iterations. I ended up hating Lorehold Charm and didn’t feel like Abrade was doing much in most matchups, so I slotted in just one Lorehold to replace a Dragonhawk, Fate's Tempest. I thought the 5/5 haste stat line might matter at times, and it was a decent option to tutor for with Maelstrom of the Spirit Dragon.
For the sideboard, I expected old Izzet Lessons with Artist's Talent and Monument to Endurance to be less popular than the Crab build, so I cut all my Requisition Raids and turned them into High Noon and the last Rest in Peace. I also replaced one Pyroclasm with a Slagstorm in case I ran into more UW Prison.
I’m not sure whether I actually taught the old dog any new tricks, but in the end, this got me to the list I submitted:
Variance in Vegas
I arrived in Las Vegas on Wednesday night for the Pro Tour. The decklist submission deadline had been at noon that day, so by the time I arrived, there was no more room for indecision. I checked into the Sahara and immediately hit the blackjack tables after getting settled. It’s good to warm up on gambling generally before you start gambling on topdecks later, right?
On Thursday, I took it easy and met up with a few friends before the player registration party. We talked through the Limited format in minor detail, bantered a bit about our Standard decks, then retired for the night to prepare for Day 1.
My first draft of the Pro Tour felt amazing. I took Bitter Triumph Pack 1 Pick 1, then followed it up with Primary Research and Render Speechless in the next two picks. Quickly in Pack 1, I realized that black and white were both getting cut aggressively. Around Pack 1 Pick 7, I saw a late Paradox Surveyor and took it as a strong signal to move into Quandrix. I got a Geometer's Arthropod second-to-last pick in Pack 1; the card isn’t incredible, but a two-mana 1/4 with solid value upside going almost dead last was another strong signal.
Drafting the open lane paid off almost immediately. I opened an Environmental Scientist in Pack 2, then immediately got passed an Emeritus of Abundance Pack 2 Pick 2, along with another Paradox Surveyor and some other solid Quandrix cards. I also grabbed a Wander Off in Pack 2, still hopeful that I could patch Quandrix’s biggest issue (the lack of good removal) with a black splash.
Everything came together in Pack 3, where I got passed a Berta, Wise Extrapolator as well as two late Titan's Graves that made my black splash extremely consistent. I ended the draft feeling optimistic. I felt rewarded for finding the open lane and drafting toward my outs for the black splash.
My first two rounds of the draft were relatively unremarkable. I won 2-1 against a cool Wisdom of Ages Izzet pile with pure curveout, then ran over a Boros deck 2-0 due to color screw.
In the trophy match, I was up against an aggressive Silverquill deck. We split the first two games in relatively close fashion, then both mulliganed in Game 3: my opponent to five, me to six. He ripped action. I ripped nothing but lands. I lost 2-1.
I was disappointed not to trophy with that draft, but sometimes the variance really is just the variance.
For the Day 1 constructed rounds, I dropped my first match in a close 2-1 against Big Prowess, the Horses and Crabs build. That put me at 2-2, which felt a little sketchy. I won’t go into every match in detail, since this isn’t exactly a tournament report, but I ended up reeling off four straight wins to finish Day 1 at 6-2.
Interestingly, I played five different decks on Day 1. After my loss to Prowess, I beat Four-Color Lute Control, Mono-Green Landfall, Izzet Spellementals, and Golgari Midrange. I was definitely running a bit hot in a few different spots, but again, I felt very comfortable on Boros Dragons and managed to eke out a few wins from some tricky positions.
For a little more color: in Game 2 against Golgari Midrange, I killed two Firdoch Cores with Get Lost and ended up dealing lethal with a Slagstorm to the face. In Game 2 against Spellementals, the defining moment was casting Spectacular Tactics on my Magmatic Hellkite to deny a Crab tapdown for tempo and completely stonewall the board.
Punting Is a Two-Way Street
I was definitely happy to make Day 2, but the job wasn’t done yet. I arrived that morning excited to draft, and I was ecstatic when I saw that my pod had three incredible players: Luis Salvatto, Jean-Emmanuel Depraz, and Shota Yasooka.
My thought process on these sorts of stacked pods is pretty straightforward: how many opportunities do I get to draft with one of the best Magic players in the world, let alone three of them in the same pod? I don’t want to call it a “privilege,” because that feels a bit too deferential to me, but it’s certainly going to be a cherished memory.
Anyway, the draft with the stacked pod felt like a minor disaster. I Pack 1 Pick 1’d Feed the Swarm and took a few white and black cards early, but it didn’t feel like the lane was particularly open. I got two Graduation Days in the pack, but I suspected those cards wheeled because people simply didn’t like them, not because no one was in Silverquill.
In Pack 2, I opened a Stirring Hopesinger, which meant I was playing Silverquill whether I liked it or not. I did get a bit of gas in the pack, picking up a Dissection Practice and a few Adventurous Eaters for cheap Repartee triggers. In Pack 3, I opened a Scheming Silvertongue, which locked me even further into my colors. At that point, white was completely cut, and I was struggling for playables in the last few picks of the draft. I ended the draft wondering whether I had 23 cards I could reasonably register against a World Champion.
As I built my deck, I saw Arne Huschenbeth across the table with two Elite Interceptors (I had none) and the rest of what looked like an extremely consistent Silverquill pile. I started laughing when I contemplated registering a Biblioplex Tomekeeper, which thankfully I didn’t. Arne looked across at my pool, then told me, “sorry man.” At that point, I felt sorry for myself too, but we still had three rounds to play.
The first match was shockingly close against a very good Lorehold deck with Ark of Hunger and almost all of the other good Boros cards. I lost handily in Game 1, then stole Game 2 with a Scheming Silvertongue that grew to a 5/7 with Graduation Day triggers.
Then I punted my face off in Game 3.
I found a pretty crisp line with Harsh Annotation on my 3/3 Scolding Administrator to make a 3/3 Inkling on my opponent’s end step. That left me with two 3/3 flyers and a 1/1 flyer against him at 4 life with no flying blockers. He had two cards in hand, and one of them was Ajani's Response.
I untapped and went for Dig Site Inventory on one of my 3/3 flyers, the Sneering Shadewriter. Unfortunately, this unlocked the Repel Calamity in his hand to kill it, while Ajani's Response killed my other attacking 3/3 flyer. Instead of dying to a swing where I’d done absolutely nothing, he took only 1. He found removal for the last flyer a turn later, and I died horribly a few turns after that.
I took a long walk and put my head down for a while after that loss. I could’ve stolen the match from an undoubtedly better deck, and instead I threw it away on a bad pump spell. In hindsight, I think I was trying to play around a second Ajani's Response because he had six mana, but that was completely unreasonable given the texture of his hand. This was probably the most disappointed I’d been in my gameplay in a long time, maybe ever.
After blasting some music through my headphones to reset mentally, I came back for the second round. I was paired against Luis Salvatto, who had drafted a Witherbloom pile. The games weren’t particularly interesting, but I got there in three off the back of Render Speechless and some mulligans from Luis.
For the last match, I was paired against Jean-Emmanuel Depraz in a Silverquill mirror. In Game 1, I landed a Stirring Hopesinger on turn five and immediately got two Repartee triggers, which effectively ended the game. The card didn’t pass the groan test from JED, which suggests to me that it isn’t very fun to play against.
In Game 2, I landed Hopesinger again, but he had an answer. I bought it back with Pull from the Grave (an important card to this story), then recast it, but he had another kill spell and the game returned to parity. A few turns later, as I was behind on board, I cast Render Speechless. He tried to cast Pull from the Grave at instant speed in response, but I pointed out that it was a sorcery. He shook his head and acknowledged the punt, and I ended up making him discard the Pull. The missed card of value became the difference in the match as I drained him out with two Sneering Shadewriters.
In my second draft, punting really was a two-way street.
One Last Dance
At 8-3, I played my next constructed match on coverage against Shota Yasooka. You can find the coverage here if you’re curious, but the extremely brief summary is that I curved out very well in Game 1, and in Game 2, he got stuck on lands (a little extra stuck because of a turn-three Magmatic Hellkite).
I ended up splitting my last four constructed matches 2-2. I beat Four-Color Elementals to requalify for the Pro Tour, then lost a very one-sided match to Christoffer Larsen on Selesnya Landfall. After that, I dreamcrushed an Izzet Prowess pair-down who was playing for a Top 8 lock, then lost my Worlds win-and-in to a lower-to-the-ground Izzet Prowess deck that drew close to the nuts both games.
As someone on coverage put it: “dance with the girl that brought you.” Boros Dragons was the deck that carried me to my first Pro Tour as much as I piloted it there, and even with the mildly turbulent conclusion, I felt very grateful to bring it to a 7-3 finish over the weekend.
As I’ve alluded to throughout this piece, I think playing a deck that I enjoyed and could pilot about as well as anyone gave me a lot of equity. Many players analyze metagame breakdowns and pick decks mostly based on what looks good in the field, but player skill and familiarity can be just as important, if not more so. If you need more evidence, check out Zevin Faust’s win rates on Azorius Prison and try to explain them away without statistical significance.
I’m self-aware enough to admit that I can’t match the reps many pilots have on established metagame decks, so I’m naturally drawn to alternative decks as a way to sidestep that gap. The Pro Tour didn’t convince me that everyone should register strange cards for the sake of it. But it did remind me that knowing your deck deeply, understanding its weird angles, accepting its bad cards, and playing to its unintuitive outs is a real edge. In this Standard format, Boros Dragons ended up being an excellent fit for me, and I’ll always be grateful it was the deck I brought.
Momo says thanks for listening. Don’t be afraid to play bad cards sometimes. If you know them and believe in them more than everyone else, they might just take you somewhere you could only imagine.