Pillow Talk MtG 14: Pivoting in Deck Selection with The Cntrlfreak

Welcome to Pillow Talk, the official competitive Magic the Gathering podcast of Team Pillow Fort! This week, Michael Killelea (AKA The CntrlFreak) returns to the show to chat with Jonathan about pivoting in deck selection: when it makes sense, what the implications are, and whether or not it's even the right call for you. Thank you as always for listening!

Team Pillow Fort's Twitter: https://x.com/TPillowFortMTG 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Welcome to Pillow Talk, the official podcast of Team PillowFort MTG. I'm your host, Jonathan Johnson, aka Tanuki JJ. And not with me is Austin Walker, but we have a special guest today, Michael, aka control freak. Welcome back, Michael.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Thanks so much for having me again for another episode. It's always uh exciting to be here and chat around and hopefully share some cool insight.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Absolutely. I was very jealous last time uh when you got to come on because I wasn't involved. So we got rid of Austin and decided that we'd we'd pull you in for this week's conversation.

SPEAKER_02 0:49

Well, I think uh I think Austin's got the podcast chops down a lot more than I do, but hopefully I can do an okay job of substituting in, and uh we'll we'll see how it goes.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

You know, Austin's definitely one of my best friends, but fun to have a conversation and mix things up. So today, uh, what we're gonna do since we have the leader and priest of the Kaito cult, uh, we have a 45-minute dissertation uh by Michael on why everybody should play Psychic Frog and Kaito. Uh, do you have your your sermon ready?

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Wait, Psychic Frog's legal legal and standard now? Is that is that something we can do with the Pro Tour going around?

SPEAKER_00 1:28

You know, I think if it was legal, I would probably register that card. It seems very good in uh that format too.

SPEAKER_02 1:33

It does. Like, who cares about these little chocobos and stuff when you just fly over and hit your opponent in the face with a frog?

SPEAKER_00 1:40

And draw a card.

SPEAKER_02 1:41

And draw a card.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Uh no, in all seriousness, though, we we have really two things that we want to tackle today. And the first is, you know, as we're recording this, we're we're currently top eight of the Pro Tour is running. And you you always see prior to these events or or right as the deck lists get published, you know, Matt Nass is playing the Green White Tokens deck. And apparently on their Discord the night before submission at like 10.30 at night, they're they're starting to talk about this list, and then he pivots last second and gets super paid off. So I wanted to talk a little bit about you know, when you're coming into these events, how do you know when your deck isn't the right thing to register? Uh, when do you decide to stick to your guns in terms of being a specialist? And then how do you know when to flip to something that might be insane, at least in the eyes of some, and then get paid off? And I I know we we're gonna have some different perspectives on this, which I thought would be be kind of helpful because uh Michael, you're you know, you're someone that has a particular style of deck that you like to play, and you know, generally you're gonna try to register that.

SPEAKER_02 2:49

Yeah, so obviously I've kind of built up my brand as being the demire guy, right? Like cross standard, modern legacy, whatever. If I can play Kaito and Psychic Frog and Enduring Curiosity, like I'm gonna register those cards more often than not. If, and there's a big asterisk in here, uh, if I feel like it's not going to hinder me too terribly, like if I'm just absolutely handcuffing myself to the radiator, then I'm gonna at least glance around at some other ideas here and there. But for the most part, if I can uh, like you mentioned, stick to my guns, play what I know, play what I feel like I'll make good decisions with, that's usually where I find myself leaning a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

So when do you start to shift that? So let's say you were playing in this pro tour, and I realized that there was one hero who did register Demir mid-range and apparently was DQ'd in round one, if I understand correctly.

SPEAKER_02 3:49

That is correct. I don't know the the full story. Uh, I definitely don't want to misspeak and say the wrong thing, but I believe there was an issue in the uh the draft portion, one of the limited games. So didn't even get to make it to constructed to show why Kaito obviously should be banned, because if somebody registers it at the Pro Tour, it's got to mean something. Um obviously.

unknown 4:14

Right.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

So yeah, it's uh it's a tricky topic when you come down to making those last-minute pivots, and I think it really comes down to something that players don't do a good job of having an objective conversation with their self about, and it's what their goals and expectations are for an event. So, for example, way back when we had all these awesome Star City Games tour events, uh, my goal for a few events was I want to be the highest placing Grix's shadow player in the room. And if that ends up being 12 and 2 and top eight, great. If it ends up being 10 and 5 and like barely squeak into the cache, great. But I'm gonna register Grix's shadow, and I'm just gonna try to prove to myself that I'm better with that deck than everybody else who's registered that deck in the room. It's not always that cut and drive a goal, but when it comes to stuff like the Pro Tour, it's a lot more of what am I what is my goal to beat? What is my goal to not lose to? And for someone like me who wants to register Kaito regardless of the situation, I see a lot of is it decks with boomerang basics, very, very difficult card for Kaito to beat. I see some of these white decks popping up with erode again, very, very tough card when you're investing three or four mana into a threat and your opponent's investing one into an answer. Not the best uh sequence of decision making, uh decision making to get you to that point, if that's what you think is going to be good enough to win games in the current format. So, yeah, it really comes down to being objective with yourself and putting a plan in place of what you want to accomplish, what you want to have a shot against, what you're okay losing to, and if that lines up with your goals for the tournament, then you can look into okay, I want to pivot because what I'm normally playing doesn't align with those goals, or I'm gonna stay the course with whatever I've been playing or whatever my pet deck is because my goals allow me some more flexibility on the result side, as long as I have something tangible that I can kind of work towards.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

That makes sense. I mean, we talked recently in another episode about you know your setting goals and being realistic with yourself. And some for some people, I think that there's a reality that you're probably not expecting to do well. I don't know if you remember this, but a couple years ago, uh Jerry Mee, who is a podcast, uh one of the co-hosts of the Leaving a Legacy podcast, which is no longer around, but he top-aided GP Niagara with Show and Tell and Legacy and tried to meme as much as possible. And I think he ended up registering Cheerios or some crazy deck in in modern that had like almost no chance of doing well, but he was trying to just effectively make it kind of a fun experience. His goal was not to try to top eight and win the pro tour, and I think that that was was clear. Okay, gamers, if you're into tabletop gaming and you're anywhere near Middle Tennessee, you need to check out Game Night in Columbia.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

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SPEAKER_00 8:02

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SPEAKER_01 8:20

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SPEAKER_00 8:27

If you were trying to take it seriously and you were playing for tens of thousands of dollars this weekend, would you have re registered Kaito in Friends?

SPEAKER_02 8:37

As much as it pains me to say, I would not have touched Kaito with a 50-foot pole. Uh, I love the card to death. I would like fall on the proverbial knife for Kaito if this situation arose. But again, expecting a large proportion of is it decks? And I think we saw day one had like 50% Steam Vince decks. Um, registering Kaito into something like that is just kind of tossing your chances of doing well out the window. And when it comes to something like the Pro Tour, my goal is not to be the best Demir pilot in the room. My goal is to play the deck that gives me the best shot into what I expect to see. Uh, so I would have been in there with some Sunderflocks and some Heartfire Elementals and hoping that carried me through some of these Cub matchups.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Got it. So you you'd be on the Spellamentals train.

SPEAKER_02 9:38

Exactly. I think that deck is uh super, super underappreciated. I know it's been a popular deck in standard for a while now, but I still feel like it doesn't get the respect it deserves when compared to Prowess and Lessons and Landfall and some of these uh more flashy big game hitters. So I'm saying spellamentals.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

We'll we'll definitely circle back to that in the second part of this conversation because I think that's going to be an interesting uh debate. Uh but how did you come to that conclusion? So let's assume we know nothing about the Pro Tour, we we just have what was expected. And I think largely people expected various Is It decks and various Cub decks, notably Landfall, to be the most popular archetypes. How do you go from you know being a Demir gamer to kind of thinking through and figuring out, all right, that that's just not it for me. And you obviously got to that, you kind of expounded upon when you're making that decision, but how did you come to the conclusion that Spellamentals was was going to be the the deck that that would be your choice?

SPEAKER_02 10:45

Right. So there's there's a few aspects of that answer. Uh first and foremost is using something like MTG decks just to get a general idea of how different decks are positioned in the meta, what some of the win rates are against some other popular archetypes, and being able to go through a lot of the the decks and see, okay, I for example, I wanted to have a positive matchup into prowess, and I wanted to have a positive matchup into the badger mold cub decks. So being able to go through the decks on uh MTG decks and see, oh uh Spellamentals is showing 61% into Prowess in the last month and 60, was it something something higher than 61% into some of the Cub decks? That seems like a place that I would be interested in starting to look at. Like maybe I end up more on Prowess as the day goes on, but ultimately picking a deck that aligns with my goals of I want to have a good matchup into Prowess, and I want to have a good matchup into Badger Mole Cub.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

There's also an element of playstyle that I think is important to note, and I this changes a little bit as you get to higher levels. I think if you're playing on the Pro Tour, it it matters, but you also have to recognize that you need to play what gives you the best chance of winning. I think a good example from recent discussions internally on the team about this was you know, Reed Duke is known for being more of a mid-range player, thought sees gamer, jund, things like that. And for a long time, you know, his his knock was that he hadn't won a Pro Tour, even though I think he was largely considered and still is one of the best players in the game. When he did finally win the Pro Tour, it was with uh creativity. So in Is It Dak more combo-based, very different than what he might normally want to play. So you you sort of eskew the play style factor from the decision. Now, if you're at that level of play, you're playing on a big testing team, I think that you should be able to do that. But what about the guy who maybe is playing their first regional championship in Cincinnati here in two weeks? And they're let's call them a Demir gamer, and or maybe they're a uh you know, rhythm gamer or something like that, and that maybe their deck isn't as well positioned. How how do they go and make those adjustments in a short window of time to decide, am I sticking to my guns and playing what I'm familiar with, or do I sort of take a leap here and challenge myself to play what I think might be better positioned?

SPEAKER_02 13:30

Yeah, so luckily there's a a pretty broad spectrum when it comes to magic decks. Like you you always hear the idea of decks either falling into say aggro or control or combo, and then you have uh a plethora of slight variations between each. Like, oh, if you get between aggro and control, you have mid-range, if you get more towards uh control to combo, you get decks like the excruciator deck and standard. So if it's me personally and I'm trying to make a pivot away from something that maybe hasn't been working as well as I thought it would recently, I'm usually starting my search by expanding like a degree to both sides of where I'm at. So, for example, the Demir mid-range deck is pretty heavily in like the mid-range control kind of spectrum. Uh, so I really want to look at going to a more hard control deck, or I want to look towards going uh for a more mid-rangey deck or um shifting a little towards the tempo side, like being more aggressive than than mid-range typically is. And that's kind of where the spell of mentals deck falls, kind of in that tempo to mid-range area. But I'm probably not going to start my conversation with myself looking at say Kona. And a lot of that is because if I picked up Kona, I might be able to make some decisions that are pretty good over the course of a tournament, but there's a very high likelihood that I'm not going to make the optimal decisions. I need to win that event because I'm not used to, I'm not, I don't have that combo element ingrained of recognizing, oh, I need to go for it here. I need to be more proactively mulliganing. I'm more of I look at this hand, it's got four lands, three spells, pretty good combination of stuff, some early interactions, snap, keep. And you can't do that with the combo decks. So I tend to kind of stay, uh, I guess stay in my lane a little bit's the best way of saying it. Um, and just trying to branch out from what I'm used to and what I've kind of championed, but I'm probably not starting off with jumping to the complete other side of the the deck kind of spectrum here, unless I start recognizing that the things I am trying out aren't working out, and I do need to make a significant pivot. But it's a process of trying stuff out, seeing how your decision making aligns with the deck that you're playing, uh, seeing if you're comfortable making those adjustments with the the 75 that you're signing up with, and then going from there constantly re-evaluating and reflecting and seeing if uh if you're hitting those goals of beating the decks, for example, you want to beat, losing to what you expect to lose to, if the decks working for you the way it's advertised, so to speak.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

That's fair. You know, to almost play devil's advocate to a degree, I I think that at times, and I've been guilty of this as well, where I've I've pivoted to something thinking it had a better matchup, or maybe I was just more scared of a particular deck in the matchups I had with what I had been practicing. I think at times we're too quick to sort of concede that a matchup is bad without putting in the work to see is there a way to fix it? Meaning, are there good tech sideboard cards and things that you can do to make a matchup go from terrible to maybe passable or possibly even flip it on its head to being a winning matchup? I think a really good example is a lot of people know me being a legacy is it delver player that Lands is historically one of our worst matchups. And I have a pretty good historical win rate there, but I'm also frequently registering to price of progress in my sideboard because having played a lot of tournaments in the Seattle area for that format, Lands was a disproportionately popular deck. So it's something I've always had on my radar. How do you how do you put the work in to determine first that the matchup is not fixable or the format is not fixable for your deck without just banging your head into a wall and coping to think that something is is gonna be good when it's not?

SPEAKER_02 18:14

Oh, that's a tough question. Um so one of the the best examples I can give is actually going back to was it Spotlight Atlanta earlier this year, uh the standard spotlight, where coincidentally I ended up meeting a lot of the the pillow for it guys. Um that's where we met.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:39

And it going into that event, I had been jamming Demir non-stop, like leagues and leagues and leagues every week, um, climbing the ranked ladder on arena, and I had come up with a configuration for Demir that I thought had a pretty good postboard game into the Badger Mole cub decks. Now, obviously, we've got all this data saying, oh, Badger Mole is a terrible matchup for Demir. Um, but I ended up trusting my gut, and unfortunately, someone who may or may not be on this call right now was my only uh cub loss on the weekend, and I went like six and one or something against the deck overall. So it really came down to trusting my preparation and my process and the results that I was getting and taking that into uh a much bigger stage. But in general, I think the sideboard is one of the most underutilized resources. And a lot of people end up just kind of registering, oh, here's 15 cards that worked for someone else, or here's the stock sideboard, and don't experiment around with, oh, this matchup's giving me trouble. Let me start utilizing some extra spots to see if I can, like you mentioned, improve the percentage there, maybe even flip the matchup, like I think I did against the Cub decks in Atlanta, and they'll give up too early. They'll say, Oh, Demir doesn't have a shot in this meta, chunk it aside, go get some reps in with something else. And obviously, it's like a sometimes you win, sometimes you lose situation, sometimes you miss out on playing Demir because you gave up on it really quickly into the testing process. And sometimes you find an absolute gem, like with the uh the guys Matt Nass and them that found the Selesnia deck. There was no testing or not testing to the extent you would expect testing to happen for a deck you're going to register at the Pro Tour. But that's where surrounding yourself with people you trust really comes in, and being able to lean on their expertise when they tell you, hey, I think I might have cracked something here. I think that this fits the decision making that you're likely to make for a tournament, and you're able to make those last second pivots uh even without the testing process that you'd normally expect. So it it's a very uh variable answer.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Um there's some nuance too, right? There's a lot. I mean, there it depends on the event you're preparing for. I mean, so for Eternal Weekend this last last year, I I pivoted last minute from Is It Delver, which I had played a million matches with, to Nadu, expecting a bunch of the blue black deck, which I was having trouble beating Barogoy. And I played against zero copies of any tempo deck, and I played against uh Cloud Post and Friends. Three out of my first five rounds, which is like one or two percent of the room. So in some of these formats and some of these tournaments, the like modern, for instance, is much harder to metagame in a big way for because people are just kind of kind of play whatever crap they want to play at times, especially early in the tournaments. Whereas a pro tour, I think you can, you know, make a whole deck decision or completely tilt your sideboard to a matchup because you might expect it's gonna be 30, 40, 50% of the room. And you know, when you're in a more narrow field versus a broad field, and depending on the format, that can change. So I think it's it's something where you you do have to be a little bit disciplined not to jump too quickly and say, oh, the data says that this matchup is bad, so I'm just gonna ditch the deck. I I think you have to wonder first, you know, were the decks actually constructed in order to win that matchup? Because there are a lot of really powerful cards to beat certain types of strategies. And a lot of times if you want to beat a deck, you can. The question is more if I put too many cards in the sideboard, can I beat that deck and still have a good matchup against the rest of the field? And I do think that's something that you have to at least explore, and that's going to require some work and some matches before you can just say, you know, I'm gonna pivot off the deck. And I think that's something where sometimes people lack the discipline for it, but there is a level of work that goes beyond just grabbing whatever top eight list is, you know, from a recent challenge, whatever they were doing, and saying that, oh, it must be bad.

SPEAKER_02 23:33

I agree, and I think that also reflects when you see a lot of the players uh that do have continued success at the highest level. Like if you take someone like Matt Nass, for example, how often do you see Matt Nass register the stock build of one of the top three decks in the format and not change anything up? Very rarely. Like it's always taking a deck that you believe has a good shot, uh uh adjusting towards what you think you're gonna run into and deciding from there if you've got the matchup spread that you feel comfortable registering at whatever event you're looking forward to. Uh, and I think that's also something that that plagues a lot of players in say RCQs. They struggle to win their RCQs because they're registering uh stock 75. They don't see the matchups that they're expecting to run into because, like you mentioned, we got modern RC season at the moment, so modern's all up in the air. Somebody shows up with a stock 75 of mono blue belcher and runs into some bad matchups on mono blue belcher and proceeds to get frustrated, say that the deck is not performing up to par, make pivots, now all of a sudden you're going to a new deck, another week out with limited testing and limited reps, and it spirals very, very quickly. And you don't want that to be the case when you're preparing for a larger event. You want to know that you've done everything you can to see: does this deck have legs? Does it have legs in the matchups that I want it to? Have I explored all of the options to get myself to those percentages that I'm interested in? And I think it's that last portion that a lot of players fall off on. And like, yeah, not everybody's gonna have the time to really grind matches, uh, get the in-depth testing that they need, but that's where you defer back to players who you trust or players that have typically played things that you felt you made good decisions with, and then kind of shortcut the testing process a little bit, kind of steal something they've been working on and make it your own at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

You you have to do that. I mean, you you don't have the time if to be able to go through everything, understand every iteration. You have to be able to take small sample sizes of data and then extrapolate, which is probably a very nice segue into sort of the the second half of our topic today. And again, pro players very frequently are gonna take something last minute and switch to it. You know, right as of right now, Matt Nass in top eight, not sure how that's going to play out, but basically takes the deck the night before. I would think that there's some reason to believe that the deck list might not even be all that refined. There might be some sideboard changes, things that if he registered it tomorrow might do a little bit differently. But that being said, made that decision. So how do we take a small sample size of data? So uh if we're playing in Cincinnati in a couple of weeks, and I know a lot of our team are focused on this, I'm focused on this, how do we take the data from the Pro Tour, which is again, it's a little bit different. I don't know that it's correct to just take a 75 and copy it and say, this is where I'm going to be for sure. You can start there, but how do we think the meta is going to adapt? How do we make those decisions? And then, you know, what's the sort of next level? Because if you're going off of last week's tournament, you're likely to be behind and people are going to be out to beat you.

SPEAKER_02 27:28

Yeah. So when you look at a very narrow meta, for example, the Pro Tour, uh, there's a lot of prediction and variance that come into play. So for example, uh Zevin Faust top aided the Pro Tour. Congrats to Zevin playing the blue-white tempo deck. And in an interview, said, I think I've got a really good matchup into the prowess decks. I think I've got a really bad matchup into Landfall. Great. Proceeded to see seven prowess decks and run them all over, just absolutely obliterated the prowess matchup. But then you've got people like um, I was looking at it earlier. Was it Larson? A couple of these top eight players. Yeah. Christopher Larsen, top eights with landfall. You expect Prowess to be the best deck in the format, and then proceeds to run into Landfall, Spellamentals, Golgari, Mardu Discard, Landfall again, blue white tempo, landfall again, Boris Dragons, Landfall again. So this is like that level two deck choice of oh, I'm expecting everybody to uh be prepping for beating lessons. I'm gonna try to beat up all the people that are trying to beat up on lessons. And if my matchup against lessons suffers a little bit, so be it. I'm taking that risk. That's the the gamble I've chosen to take. That's what my goal is to beat the decks that are beating up on lessons. And he did. He absolutely smoked everything, never ran into lessons, and it pays off. So when you're getting to picking a deck for something like the RC coming up for Cincinnati, it's so much more open. You're not going to see 60% lessons, you're very unlikely to see 40% landfall or whatever the ProTora breakdown on landfall was. Um, you're far more likely to see a combination, you're more likely to see off-the-wall stuff, you're likely to see people who are also trying to predict what the meta is going to be and not be registering a stock 75. So flexibility plays a huge role, being able to adapt to a variety of different matchups, being able to recognize that what my deck does has got some positive points into what I expect, but also accepting that there's going to be a chance that you guess wrong and just don't run into the matchups you're prepared to run into. And sometimes you just have to wipe off the dust and move on to the next one.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

The funny, funny note there, I believe there was an interview during the Pro Tour where Christopher Larson basically said that he pivoted to the deck, the Celesnia Landfall deck late. And I think the comment was effectively if Javier Dominguez tells you to play something, you play it. And you know, he's had good success of just kind of picking up whatever he tells him. So maybe just find that really smart friend that always makes the right read and just play whatever they tell you to play.

SPEAKER_02 30:51

Exactly. Go make some friends with some people at the pro tour that did well, ask them why they played what they played, and jump on the the next iteration of that.

SPEAKER_00 31:01

You know, there is some uh some merit. I have definitely had some events where I didn't know what to register, and I had a friend that I trust and said, Yeah, I'm just gonna register whatever 75 that you pick up and hope for the best. And we'll we'll we'll test that you know matchup together. Uh it doesn't happen very well.

SPEAKER_02 31:18

I've definitely had that, and I've also had people just message me the morning of an RCQ and be like, what's your demir list? Like, you're tuned for what you expect to see this weekend. Shoot me your 75. Like, all right, let's do this.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

Yeah. I mean, if if you've got someone that's playing that deck and you know has put the work in, uh, certainly reasonable. We've got some people on our team that are specialists in different decks. And you know, I I know if I need a belcher list at a sideboard guide that I've got a couple people I can go to or amulet titan, what have you. You know, standard shifting a lot and and moving around. So let's make a couple of sort of predictions. With surprisingly, the prowess deck did not put any any copies in top eight. I think coming into this pro tour, a lot of people were expecting that that deck was going to be relatively dominant, or at least certainly very prevalent, and basically kept a 50% win rate in spite of being very heavily played relative to other decks. And there's you know some back and forth on it simply because it is a split format that you have to have a good limited performance as well. But what we did see instead was a ton of landfall, which I think in the past has had a difficult time beating the prowess decks, but apparently didn't this weekend. So, what are the next natural shifts that we see? So we see this green-white token stack uh obviously beaten up on a handful of things. How does one predict what changes we're gonna see between the Pro Tour and maybe next weekend as we're getting ready to do Cincinnati here in a couple weeks?

SPEAKER_02 32:54

Yeah, so some of my immediate thoughts, we like you mentioned, saw a really big decline in the the win rate of like the prowess decks for this weekend. And I think a large portion of that can be attributed to the landfall decks really going over the top with interaction. Uh so for example, you see like all of the mono green decks are running uh Melt Striders Resolve, the Selesnia variants are running Steam Rip and a Road. I just saw a list with Dragon Sniper in the main that top aided out of one of the landfall lists. So like these decks are adjusting by saying, hey, the way that we lose this game is not interacting with stuff like slick shot show off. So we're gonna up the amount of interaction we've got for a card like that. The natural progression, I believe, uh, when you see this sort of result is one, you're gonna have a lot of people just picking up landfall. Um mono green or Slesnia proactive uh ramp strategies have always been pretty popular at the paper levels. A lot of times you'll see pro tour players lean a little bit more towards the mid-rangey and control decks, where like you have a little more um control over your actions, your interaction, and you kind of leverage timing a little bit more. But for the paper meta, um people just like hitting their opponent in the face with big, dumb, stupid creature. And if they can do that very consistently, then so be it. Uh for the prowess matchup or for the prowess decks, what I would expect to see is a little bit of a shift towards some more value-oriented threats. Like we see Prowess isn't running, for example, Sunderflock compared to compared to the Spellamentals deck. The top-ranked Prowess deck at the end of the weekend, Liam Kane was running Drakecatcher. So kind of branching out of that easily one-for-one threat package that Prowess has kind of gotten accustomed to. Yeah, like this list is on four Colorstorm stallion, two Drake catcher, no copies of Eddie Merc Crab. So seeing things like that to combat the cheap interaction that like the landfall decks and the the uh Selesnia decks are kind of bringing in bringing to the table, I think is a good, a good step in the right direction. Probably likely to see an uptick in like excruciator, because being able to just wrath your landfall opponent over and over again is a reasonable place to be, plus having a combo finish that they can't really interact with too well.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

You can take their forests too. So, I mean, if you you kill if you wipe their board, you can collect evidence and take anything from the graveyard, right? So I'm pretty sure you can just wipe out all their forests and kind of remove a big angle for for how they can sort of catch up with stuff like sapling nursery or right, huge angle when half of their fetches aren't doing anything relevant, right? So I you know I think that there's multiple levels to it. So the level zero, right, is is where a lot of people kind of fall into a trap, which is this this deck did well with the Pro Tour. I remember years ago, I I played a standard GP for the first time in a while and didn't know what to do. It was right after a PT, so a friend said, Hey, I'll bring you this list that had done well. So I just did that and did fine. So that could be I'm gonna play one of these deck lists from the top eight that did well.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 36:45

And I I think that that falls into a trap because let's say Landfall is super popular, this Matt Nat's deck is super popular, and then you had mentioned earlier that you liked the idea of spellamentals, someone like myself who has liked the prowess deck and blue red in general. Well, I might say, well, I I kind of want to get into the train of I'm gonna play some Sunderflocks. Now, I know we just watched Max Komonowski lose to that matchup. Um but I think Sunderflock in general and being able to tech for for some other cards is kind of that next level, right? Where you you're finding the way to beat those cub decks, make that interaction difficult. And then there's the the level after that level, which says, okay, the landfall or the cub decks are falling back because people are picking up on Sunderflock and Elementals again. And I'm gonna punish them by playing a white deck with rest in peace and other interaction to make it really difficult for them to put out any other threats. And then the way to respond to then that is going back to that prowess, right? Where you have the the horse and you have Drake Hatcher, you have elusive otter and stuff that isn't so reliant on the graveyard. So a lot of it comes down to this sort of shift of in the next couple of weeks, I expect that we're probably going to see almost like a circular pattern to where we start to see that rotation. And we may see it multiple times. And the question is just sort of where do you land in Cincinnati within that rotation? Are you going to want to be the landfall deck or the cub deck? Do you want to be the Sunderflock deck beating those decks? Or do you want to be the interaction rest in peace deck that beats that deck? Or do you want to be the aggressive prowess deck that kind of dodges a lot of the hate that's out there? And I think that that's sort of the difficulty with these formats and what makes them interesting in a healthy meta game. It's not just, you know, how do I win the VV cauldron mirrors? Um, there's a lot to think about in terms of where that meta shifts between now and two weeks out.

SPEAKER_02 38:46

Yeah, it is really interesting when you look at meta shifts on at somewhere like the Pro Tour versus the RC level. Like it's very, very easy for a Pro Tour team to say, hey, we think we've broken the Selesnia deck, 10 p.m. the night before deck submissions. Let's pivot. Uh your average RC competitor is not gonna have that same level of flexibility. So they're more likely to be locking in decks now for two weeks out compared to the night before when the latest, coolest tech shows up at the last minute. So I would be I'd be pretty inclined to feel a bit safer about registering something that I think is like reasonable into the PT meta, uh, because at the end of the day, people love emulation, they love uh registering the 75 that their local hero plays or the the cool player they saw at the top eight of the Pro Tour. Uh so I feel like I would start with choosing a deck that I feel has a reasonable shot into a decent portion of the top eight, like looking at landfall, looking still at prowess, even if it didn't put a copy in top eight, it looks like it's got 10 copies in the top 32, which is partially attributed to just the sheer number of prowess decks that were registered, but it's still something that you need to be very, very wary of. Uh, so registering something that I think is okay into landfall, has a game plan for prowess, and make those micro adjustments after this. Of okay, well, if people are looking at the the level one decks, if they're also looking at beating up on those things, what are they going to be playing to have that edge? So keeping up with magic online challenge results with league results for the decks that you're interested in, to always try to get like the first eyeballs on that new tech or the new thing that might spike that you want to be weary of. Um, but for me personally, like I said, I feel fairly comfortable uh going into Cincinnati if I have a good game plan into what did well at the Pro Tour and whatever the very next level of iterations of some of those decks are. That's gonna be my goal.

SPEAKER_00 41:25

I I think if you you can get on that level, you're probably gonna be in a pretty good spot. There is the you know, reality as into late day two, um, most people are gonna be on that next level, I would assume. So day one, depending on how stuff shakes out. Now, I've played just great players in the first few rounds of of RCs, that definitely happens. But there's there's gonna be some higher level of preparation understanding. So I think that there's a reality too that if you don't have the cards and you have to get a 30 envelope order from TCG player in order to try to get it in the next two weeks, you know, there's a reality that that might be difficult or impossible for some, or just the financial reality that so many cards are expensive these days.

SPEAKER_02 42:08

And that definitely plays into why I think more people are going to be kind of locking in their decks now based off the pro tour results, as opposed to locking it in 10 p.m. the night before deck submission in Cincinnati.

SPEAKER_00 42:23

That's fair. Yeah, I think uh the 10 p.m. pivots uh I think more often than not for your average player are probably mistakes. Um I agree. But there's there's lots of room to think about that between now and then. And I think if you have access to the cards, try some different things. But I do think one of the pieces that you're gonna have to do is be a little bit more creative with your sideboard. Make sure that you have a plan for every major matchup that you expect to see. Now, if your sideboard mapping doesn't include Kona and you you run into that deck, you know, you might get punished for it, but you're gonna need to have a plan for landfall for sure. You're gonna need to have a plan for um probably this this Matt Nass uh green-white cub deck. You're gonna need to have a plan for is it prowess still? You're gonna need to have a plan for lessons and for spell elementals and you know for excruciator. There has to be some amount of flexibility to where you at least know what a game looks like where you're winning that matchup. If it's a 40% winning matchup, that means that a good portion of the time, even though you're unfavored, you're still gonna win. You need to understand what those games look like, what kind of hands get you to that game state, and make sure that going in, because if you're gonna win 11 matches in a regional championship, you're gonna play some bad matchups and you're gonna have to win some of them. So you need to understand what that looks like and not just make the excuse later on that, oh, I didn't get the matchups that I wanted. Because sometimes you're gonna play the deck that's 4% of the room five times during your, you know, 16 round or 15 round. Round event that happens.

SPEAKER_02 44:02

No, I I agree completely there. Like at the end of the day, you can prepare as much as you possibly can, but there's no guarantee that that preparation is going to pay off. It's all about putting yourself in a position where the odds are in your favor that it has a higher impact or higher chance of impacting versus not. And when it comes to the smaller events, like the RC, you mentioned the difference between the day one uh general player base and the day two general player base, and I don't think that can be understated enough. Like you're going to play some pretty good players uh day one, because at the end of the day, everybody qualified for the RC, but there are a lot of people that qualified through effectively gifting uh invitations, through homie scooping, through whatever the kids are calling it nowadays.

SPEAKER_00 45:09

I think homie scoop is the technical term, but I'm a bit of a boomer, so I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 45:14

So there are going to be those matchups where you do run into somebody who didn't do the preparation that you did, uh, doesn't have the reasoning behind a lot of their decisions like you do, and they're just running the worst possible matchup you could ever run into. Like they're playing mono white prison with four high noon and four rest in peace in the main deck, and you're playing spell or um prowess, and your life just sucks for that next 50 minutes.

SPEAKER_00 45:46

Yeah, that happens. And you know, that's where most most of the time you're not seeing people win big big events going undefeated. So you're gonna have some of those that you can get, and that's where I think you have to really understand in the margins those those matchups, what the play patterns look like and what those those game states look like where you're winning, even when you expect it to be difficult.

SPEAKER_02 46:09

Agreed.

SPEAKER_00 46:09

Very much agreed. Any final thoughts on those those two topics before we move on for some pillow talk?

SPEAKER_02 46:17

Um, not too much. I think that we've got like a short enough kind of break between the Pro Tour and Cincinnati that a lot of results from the Pro Tour are going to be on everybody's mind. Uh, we'll be interested to see what kind of players come up with the next big innovation. We've we've known for the last uh, I don't know, two years that mod or that standard was mostly an is it format. We've seen so many bands out of the is it decks. It's still gonna be big target on its back, still potentially uh number one contender every weekend, even if it didn't do well this one week. Uh so I'll be interested to see if any new stuff comes around. I think standard being in a a three-year rotation is pretty interesting because, for example, a lot of the is it cards, uh, there are some that are fairly new to the competitive scene, but then there's a lot that have been played for the last couple years, like your your ops and um sleight of hands and burst lightnings and stuff like that. And a lot of cards out of the the green ramp decks have been played for the last year or so. So it is a lot more kind of rock, paper, scissors than what you would normally expect out of a standard format, and there's a lot less room for coming up with a brand new archetype that nobody's come up with, and a lot more of coming up with the next latest and greatest innovation of something that might already be established.

SPEAKER_00 48:00

And knowing how to play your deck really, really well. I think that that is the strength. I know we talked a lot about pivoting, but of being a specialist, I think that there's some strength to knowing your deck really well. So if you do pivot, try to do it in a way where you can put in sufficient reps, and maybe that means being the enemy side for your friends, testing so you can understand how the different decks play out. Or, you know, you've got two weeks, you can put in a lot of matches and get sufficient reps in that time frame. So I think it's just something where know how to play your deck well, understand the format, know what wins look like for whatever you end up registering.

SPEAKER_02 48:39

Agreed.

SPEAKER_00 48:40

All right, so it's closing time. We got to take a deck home. It's time for some pillow talk. Michael, give me your pick for standard if the RC were next weekend and for modern.

SPEAKER_02 48:51

In standard, I already mentioned that I've I've kind of got my eyes on the is it spellamentals deck. If I had to pick up something based off of the Pro Tour landscape, I think that the Spellamentals deck has a good time into lessons, it's got a good time into prowess, and I think that there's a lot of really good unexplored tech or sideboard adjustments to be made for the landfall deck. Uh, so I'm gonna be taking is it spellamentals? Big shout out to Max Komanowski for making top eight with spellamentals, making sure that the dream stays alive. Uh for modern, if I had an RCQ this weekend that I had to go win, and at the end of the day, winning is my one and only goal. I would really be looking towards Jet Sky Blank. Um, I think that the deck has not been having the greatest win percentage as of recently, but local RCQs really likely to play against a lot of opponents who are registering their own quirky builds of whatever deck they've got. So being proactive, being interactive on the board is a really big deal. If not, Jess Guy Blink, tried and true Boros Energy. Like it's the most popular deck in the format for a reason. It's got some hands that you just can't outvalue. So is it Spelamentals for standard Jess Guy Blink? Yeah, or Boros Energy for modern.

SPEAKER_00 50:27

Good choices, good choices. I think for me that I would still stay on the prowess train, but I really like the list that Matiaritzi took to the PT to an 8-1 finish. It has the slick shots, the Eddie Merck Crabs game one, and then a really nice pivot against some of the more aggressive graveyard hate, uh, with one color storm stallion in the main, but two in the sideboard plus the rouse, to where postboard you can have a pretty good strategy even if they're attacking your graveyard. So I think that the interaction here is pretty solid. Lots of removal for some of the cub decks to give you some flexibility. And I do think that looking at sort of how the sideboard was constructed, it looks very well thought out for the specific matchups. So um obviously a great finish. So congrats to them for a really nice 8-2 at the PT. And in modern, uh, I've been for a minute playing the Emory Cutter deck. I still love that deck. I think it's sort of a hybrid with a good mid-range type affinity deck. It's really consistent. And I feel like I can beat anything with that deck. Like anything, you can't beat everything, but you you've got a reasonable game plan that uh I know what those wins look like. So if I was playing an RCQ tomorrow, I'd play Emory Cutter. If I were playing the RC tomorrow, I would probably play something very similar to what Matiya Ritzi played in uh the PT.

SPEAKER_02 51:50

Sounds like a pretty good lineup of decks to me.

SPEAKER_00 51:52

Great. Well, hopefully those will line up for us well. Michael, I appreciate you taking the time to hang out with us today while Austin uh day two'd his first pro tour, barely missed the re queue, but huge congrats to him. Also to Tyson from the team who got a day two on his first PT and the re-qualification. So he's heading to Amsterdam. Uh, super happy for our PT competitors, and we'll see Austin back here next week.

SPEAKER_02 52:18

Love to see it. Congrats to both of them.

SPEAKER_00 52:21

Well, thank you for coming to our pillow talk.