A retrospective on Magic and my tournaments in 2019/2020

This Magic year was fairly unremarkable for me. There were many unremarkable finishes, a few decks I really loved, and also a bunch of Organized Play-related things that made me try to figure out what my role in Magic was/will be/is.

I played 1 Mythic Championship, 1 Pro Tour, 14 individual Grand Prix.

Each of the below tournaments, I’m excluding byes from my record, so if you want to figure out the exact record, just add 2 to the win column.


GP Richmond Legacy 2018 6-4-2 RG Lands.
I remember this tournament because it felt like a ton of my matchups were a struggle once I got into the draw bracket. I didn’t concede to Christian Hauck before getting my first draw because I felt like I could still win from the spot I was in.

GP New Jersey Standard 2018 3-3 drop Golgari Midrange.
Not much to say here. I believe Golgari in some form was great, but certainly not how I chose to build it for this tournament. I convinced myself to play the Immortal Sun maindeck, and that was just not good.

GP Atlanta Modern 2018 1-3 drop Amulet Bloom.
I remember punting r4 to fellow massdrop friend Mark Jacobson on Green Tron by not playing around something. This tournament reconvinced me that Edgar/Dilks/Ayers are just much better than I am with the current iteration of this deck.

PT Grn Standard/Draft 2018 (8-8) 4-2 draft 4-6 standard Golgari Midrange.
I went 2-1 in both of my draft pods, drafting 5c and Golgari splash Camaderie. I also played Golgari Midrange again, but having access to other teammates made the deck a bit better.


After PT GRN, it was a bit of a lull until 2019, where I found a Modern deck I really loved and decided to go to GP Oakland.

GP Oakland Modern 2019 9-4 Experimental Frenzy Affinity.
I found a list from the MTGO 5-0s that had Frogmite (quickly cut from the deck) and Experimental Frenzy. Frenzy proved to be a missing link to crush decks that tried to grind you out by killing all of your stuff.

GP New Jersey RNA Limited 2019 7-6.
I honestly don’t remember much about this tournament except I was ‘6-0’ into ‘6-3’ in the sealed deck portion. You win some, you lose some, I suppose.

GP Toronto Modern 2019 8-5.
I ran back Frenzy Affinity after Elenbogen was also sold on the deck. Izzet Phoenix was the ‘new’ hotness (not that new, but iterated a bunch, I did play it in a December MTGO RPTQ where I failed to qualify on tiebreakers). Affinity felt a lot worse in this tournament (even with the Frenzy plan) since Frenzy didn’t line up particularly well versus Thing in the Ice.

GP Cleveland RNA Limited 2019 2-3 drop.
I didn’t do great in the sealed portion, but I had the pleasure of watching Allen Wu crush the tournament very easily with no coverage, including drafting one of the best Simic decks in the top 8 (that i’ve ever seen in the draft format).

GP Tampa Bay Modern 2019 9-4 Izzet Phoenix.
I had an interesting decision regarding a decklist mishap in round 9. So I accidentally registered the wrong manabase after cutting green from my deck, and called it on myself before round 9 started (idk how i didn’t realize this before). The options were: make the deck match what was registered or make the decklist match what I actually played. The first involved no game loss, and the second involved a game loss. I chose the latter, but I believe from an equity standpoint that doing the former might have been better. It’s a weird question of ethics/intention. I ended up losing that specific match to RG Shift 1-2 after starting down a game, so i wonder what would have happened.

GP Niagara Falls Legacy 2019 1-3 drop Lands.
Not much to say except I made an egregiously awful play by tapping my Mox Diamond instead of a blood mooned land versus Red Prison and lost because of that.
Lands felt kinda awful for this tournament and I should have probably registered Depths or UW Blade (congratulations again to Daniel Goeschtel for winning here).

GP Madison WAR Limited 3-3 drop.
I remember having Nicol Bolas (UBBBR) version in my deck, but it being hard to cast and also being kind of awkward in general. I did lose my win and in for the draft portion, but i think my deck was only okay in retrospect.

GP Kansas City Standard 10-3 Sultai Command the Dreadhorde.
I went to this tournament for a few reasons: I thought it would be relatively small/soft, plus I wanted to hang with Scotty Lipp, who is always a good time. I think I probably punted my win and in versus Brian Boss in round 14 by siding out 1 Hydroid Krasis versus Boros Feather, but we’ll never know for sure since he softlocked me very quickly with Reckless Rage and Feather.

GP Washington DC MH1 Limited 10-3.
So, this event was near and dear to my heart, so I practiced a TONNE. I agreed to be one of the ‘featured’ sealed deck builders, and in fact built my deck on Friday (and left it with CFB staff after I built it). Notable about this deck was the plethora of manafixers. So I approached building this deck by putting all of my good cards in and then slowly taking out the worst cards and ended up with a fullon Sultai deck that had good mana, Future Sight, and Rotwidow Pack. I ran the tables fairly easily, although I came close to decking a few times. I hoped I wouldn’t squander the 9-0 start, but the 1st draft pod was a tough one. I ended up drafting Monowhite with 2 (3?) Battle Screeh splashing 1 mob, and lost to Ben Weitz r1 of draft and Xinyu Fei r3 of draft. In the 2nd draft pod, I opened and passed Hogaak (now I believe this is a mistake in retrospect) and draft a solid but uninspiring snow deck to 2-1. Also of note is due to how limited GPs work, I played against Rosum 3 times and went 2-1 vs him.

GP Seattle MH1 Limited 9-4.
This was an interesting event since it was the first event I played with ‘two’ Day 1s. I went 5-2 in the first day 1 (after byes), and went 3-2-1 drop in the second one.
I managed to re-lock up silver by going 4-2 in the drafts the next day (1-2 in pod 1, 3-0 in pod 2) and my pod 2 deck was truly absurd with Hexdrinker, Dead of Winter, plenty of snow lands, Deep Forest Hermit.

GP Atlanta Legacy (Wrenn and Six legal) 10-2-2 RUG Delver.
I had played a few weeks of Legacy before this event, including winning one of the MTGO Legacy Playoffs with RUG Delver and just concluded playing anything else was a mistake. My losses in the GP were a mirror and to Burn in top 8, so I feel justified in my decision to completely stick with the deck. I do think banning Wrenn was likely correct since this deck had an absurd win rate for me versus everything (and even their mtgo data purportedly showed that it had a 55% win rate vs the field).

Mythic Championship Richmond 4-2 Draft 6-4 Standard Sultai Food
Again, I gravitated towards a midrange deck, but this time I do believe it was an error to register any deck that did not contain Goose/Oko. The true story of this tournament was Tommy Ashton breaking it with Sultai Cat Food, which the portion of our team who registered that deck had some astounding win rate of 70%+.


This brings me to discussing Organized Play in 2019 and in the future 2020.

I do not love the direction and emphasis on Arena personally, especially the enormous number of discretionary invites that were handed out. However, I do not begrudge any of my friends who accepted / were granted them, and in fact were personally happy for them to get opportunities. But, where does that leave people who try to get through the system ‘normally?’ The Mythic Point distribution was so heavily skewed towards Arena MCs this past year that if you managed to get a few discretionary invites, the deck was heavily stacked in your favour.

Second, I believe the MPL as a ‘weekly program to watch’ was an enormous failure. I and (many people I talked to) did not care to watch it for a multitude of reasons. It was pre-recorded, the Standard formats were often outdated, and it was ONLY Standard. In addition, the major prize seemed to be byes at specific Arena MCs into day 2, which is an enormous competitive advantage but also not a prize you can literally explain to someone off the street.

Third, the Pro Player club was removed, but is somewhat alleviated by fractional invites in 2020. I plan on playing enough Grand Prix (even when byes are removed) to try to play every Regional Player Tour, but I do worry that the ‘specialness’ of the Pro Tour won’t have the same feel at the Regional Player Tour.

I mostly wrote this blogpost to be honest with myself about what I could do better and what actually occurred in tournaments.

I hope to improve on a lot of stuff still, and perhaps I will do even better in 2020. I still have 1 Player's Tour invite left, but I do believe that the first one will be the biggest one by far.

Going forward, I don’t know precisely how I’ll approach Magic. Perhaps I’ll be tired of trying to spike a tournament after 2020, and perhaps I’ll get tired of streaming Legacy/Modern/Pioneer. But I’m down to at least give another year of effort. All I know is that I’m not perfect, but no one is.

Thanks for reading.