Eight and a Half Tales

Tales From The Pro Tour

Eight Magic Stories

Author: Nico Bohny

Magic is about stories.

The bad beats, the good runs, the travelling, and the time we spend with our friends. Let me share with you some of my most enjoyable and most frustrating moments playing Magic.

  1. The Missed Land Drop

If you think you had bad punt days playing Magic, wait until you hear my story. The worst part about the story is that it happened during a Sealed Team Grand Prix – a pretty large trio tournament with around 2000 players usually.

We had a pretty good day 1, going 8-1 with a fine but not spectacular Sealed pool, but we all had tight and interesting games and manages to squeeze some wins out of very uncomfortable board situations with some nice plays.

Serum Powder DST

After opening another slightly above average pool on day 2, we lost round 1, which was already kind of a bummer. Round 2 started suboptimal as well, I had to mulligan and never found lands to play any spells in my first game.

Of note, the old Mulligan rules back then worked as follows: On a Mulligan to 6, you only drew 6 cards, but then scried 1.

I won game 2, but had to mulligan again for game 3. I kept my six cards and peeked at the top card of my deck, pondering for a while and keeping the card on top.

My opponent played a land and passed, I drew the card I already saw, pondered some more on what I needed to draw in order to get into the game and passed the turn. When my opponent played his second land, I noticed that there was no land on my side of the battlefield.

I just forgot playing one. Ouch!

I tried to keep calm, trying not to unsettle my team and focussing on my game, but I had no chance on coming back. I think without my mistake, I could realistically have won that game.

After our team lost the round 1-2, I told them about my punt. Normally I don’t care a ton about my punts after the initial moment of frustration, but when your whole team has to suffer the consequences, it just feels very bad. My teammates did a great job on encouraging me and talk down what just happened, but the loss was just the beginning. We ended up going 0-4-1 on day two, misfortune accompanied the bitter aftertaste of my brainfreeze.

Brain Freeze SCG

When I came home, after some travelling hours overthinking how a mistake like this can even happen and if I should stop playing Magic now, I had to draft some Iconic Masters on Magic Online to ease my pain.

And believe it or not, my first round opponent mulliganed to six, and missed his first land drop too. Isn’t it iconic, don’t you think?

I decided to keep on playing Magic…

Mulligan

2. The Perfect Stormbreath

Before playing a Theros Sealed Grand Prix, we did a side event draft on Friday to get into the right mood. I opened a Stormbreath Dragon, one of the biggest Limited bombs back in the days, as well as the most valuable Mythic Rare in the set.

I won the draft and earned some jealousy from my roommate Mat for my infinite luck. I decided to double up and snuck the Stormbreath Dragon I just drafted into one of my prize packs. Then I turned back to Mat and told him I felt like challenging Fortuna once more, tore the prepared booster open in front of him and fished the Stormbreath Dragon out of it. His face turned red, and he walked away in disgust, shaking his head while cursing my infinite luck once more.

Well, I was curious to see what hid in my pack as its actual rare. It was another Stormbreath Dragon.

3. *Bye*

Team Trio Event always were a blast. I happily remember team events back in the days when you could choose your own team name. My favorite tournament was the one we dressed up as Chipmunks and had a radio with us to play the chipmunk soundtrack whenever we would arrive at a table. Unfortunately, the tournament organizer confiscated the radio after round one. It was also a good subgame guessing the age of our opponents, after reading their team name and how good they were at Magic.

I remember a bigger tournament, I think it was a Grand Prix or Pro Tour Qualifier back in the Onslaught block days, when a team registered with the name *Bye*. They actually won two rounds without playing since their opponents didn’t show up, thinking they had an actual Bye and went out to eat something or take a break. After the tournament, the team was told not to use the name again. And soon after, Wizards stopped the whole team name thing.

Maybe there were similar situations at other events.

While I was on the train for Pro Tours, I head judged some Pro Tour Qualifiers. I was quite experienced with the rules, but to be honest, I was quite lost with some other judge topics back then.

We were on to the quarterfinals of our event, and a good friend of mine was up 1-0 against a French player. When I walked by the match, my friend had his opponent dead on board. I checked the other matches and came back to congratulate my friend, who was shuffling his cards and talked to his opponent. I made a statement in German about the interesting board situation he was in and about the sweet line to victory, but after a weird look from both my friend and his opponent, I noticed that my friend actually lost that game because he didn’t see the line I just told him about.

I had to apologize and explain to the French player who didn’t actually understood German what just happened. He reacted quite angry, which I fully understood. He said he would have appealed to the head judge for outside assistance, but since the head judge was me, he couldn’t, and I couldn’t do anything about it as well. I felt terrible and was very sorry, and fortunately, the French player ended up winning the PTQ in the end, so wasn’t mad about me after the event.

Judge Unworthy FUT

5. Snap Pick

Snapcaster Mage ISD

I was playing a Chaos Draft at my local store, the store I started playing Magic at like twenty-five years ago. We were in a good mood, and I sat beside a player I didn’t know yet but seemed like a nice guy. After we had some fun drafting our first two packs, he picked up his third pack, Modern Masters. He picked a random uncommon and passed me a Snapcaster Mage. Important note – we keep the cards we draft. Snap Pick. And started considering how to move on.

I was pretty sure he had no clue he just passed me some good money, but I didn’t want to expose my neighbour by mentioning his pick. I was torn between not telling him at all or just giving him the Snappy after the draft. In the end, I told him about the value of Snapcaster in private after the draft, and offered him half the price of the card after selling it. He was happy about it, so it seemed like a classic win-win. Still, I was unsure what a „fair“ handling of this situation was at a casual fun event like this.

I would love to hear your thoughts about it.

6. Love and Marriage

When we were young, we regularly did these preview marathons. We started with a midnight preview on Friday night, progressed with some drafts in the morning and another Sealed event during Saturday afternoon and evening, and wrapped it up with another prerelease at Sunday.

After 40 hours of magic without much sleep, our minds were usually pretty devastated. I remember eating pasta one Sunday evening and wondering if the spaghetti had haste. Of note: That was before Emrakul was printed and got hasty with Through the Breach. One similar experience was that after one of these sessions, I dreamed about how I married Iridescent Angel, which I played at one of my previews.

When I told the story to my preview marathon fellow, he laughed out loud and stated that he dreamt the same thing this night, with the main difference that he had to marry Braids, Cabal Minion. Considering the options, I still stand by my pick.

I remember eating pasta one Sunday evening and wondering if the spaghetti had haste.

7. Giving birth to the 10 Rare Challenge

I started doing these on GP’s and Pro Tours I was out of contention for money or day 2. My goal was to raredraft and play a deck with 10 rares in it – the bonus goal was to win some games with it. And yes, back in the days, packs had exactly one rare and not five like nowadays, so the challenge was actually not easy to pull off.

It was good value to draft all the rares anyway, and the look on the faces of my opponents was priceless. One of my first 10 rare challenge I did on a Pro Tour after 1-4 in the Constructed part – back then you needed a 5-3 to make day 2.

I drafted a sweet four color deck with 3x Dark Tutelage, removal and lots of life gain. The deck didn’t win a single match, but it was very entertaining to play and felt better than I originally thought. After a successful 10 Rare Challenge in Innistrad, I won a game at a Grand Prix by curving Screeching Skaab, milling two off-color rare creatures, trading away the Skaab, and slamming Skaab Ruinator, cast off Stensia Bloodhall, Hinterland Harbor and Island.

After this win, I started recording 10 rare Challenge videos with my friends on YouTube, creating a true monster in our very first recorded draft which could cast Increasing Ambition for Alpha Brawl or combo off with Parallel Lives, Back from the Brink and Manor Gargoyle.

Dark Tutelage M11

We went 2-1, losing the finals, experiencing a whole lot of rare interactions we have never seen so far. Many Swiss, German and Austrian players joined in the nonsense and started recording the challenge too – Innistrad was actually a great format to do it.

8. Mana Flood deluxe

I heard some fun refund stories for Magic Online events. A guy once complained losing to Pack Rat multiple times in a PTQ and got refunded for it.

I had some up and downs with refunds on Magic Online, being on the wrong end of policies several times, but also getting some generous refunds now and then.

We were recording a 10 Rare Challenge video, but ended up with only seven rares, not wheeling some unplayable ones we expected to grad later. We opted to drop from the draft and record another draft, but before we did, we wanted to give our first round opponent the pleasure of playing against a 10’000 card deck. So we literally added tons of lands, but couldn’t get over 1500. So we contacted the support, complained about it and actually got a refund for the event.

8.5. 10 Rare Stories

These are bonus stories around 10-Rare-Challenges, but they’re always good enough to bring back:

  • My challenge buddy Tobi played a red/black aggro deck at a Grand Prix, playing some off color rares to get a rare count of 10. His opponent, after losing game 1 to a fast start of the RB deck, played Merfolk Observer, looked at the top card of Tobi‘s library, and gave him a very weird look. Tobi drew for his turn, and revealed: Near-Death Experience. We had a good laugh.
  • The first 3-0 we had in a 10 Challenge 8-4 draft was by chaining Hero’s Podium into Xenagos, God of Revels, Triad of Fates and Anthousa, Setessan Hero. Needless to say, we felt like we had just won a GP.
Near-Death Experience ROE

You can find me and my stuff on YouTube, X and Twitch, be sure to catch up and say hi:

twitter.com/ShirKahnMTG

youtube.com/@ShirKahnMTG

twitch.tv/ShirKahnMTG

About the Author

Nico Bohny is a retired Pro Player from Switzerland. His impressive resume contains of two PT top 8’s, 2 Grand Prix Top 8’s and a win with the Swiss national team at Worlds 2007, where they beat Austria in the finals. He’s a Vintage aficionado and skilled Limited player.

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