Pro Tour Aetherdrift Report

Getting Ready for MagicCon Chicago

Pro Tour with the Worldly Counsel

Author: Zen Miyaji-Thorne

Hello everyone!

These past couple of months have been a busy time for me, as I was fortunate enough to compete in Pro Tour Aetherdrift in Chicago towards the end of February, shortly followed by the Regional Championships in Sydney at the beginning of March. Leading up to these two tournaments, I spent a significant amount of time preparing for them, which was both enjoyable and stressful at times.

In today’s article, instead of going over Magic strategy, I will be going over my Pro Tour Aetherdrift experience – covering what it’s like to prepare with a testing team and compete in a high-level tournament! Be sure to also check out my next article, which will be coming out soon after, where I will be going over my Regional Championships experience as well!

Pre-Chicago Workout

As per usual, I tested with team Worldly Counsel for Pro Tour Aetherdrift. Our roster for this Pro Tour was as follows:

Christian Calcano

Michele Carretta

Derrick Davis

David Gonzalez

Liam Kane

Andrea Mengucci

Arch Dota

Benton Madsen

Carlos Oliveros Guntin

Charalampos Kikidis

Connor McGillivray

Guilermo Sulimovich

Jonathan Lobo Melamed

Lorenzo Terlizzi

Marc Peral

Zen Miyaji-Thorne

Eduardo Sajgalik (not qualified, but joined us in the testing house)

The format for Pro Tour Aetherdrift was Standard – a format I hadn’t played at all since I made the Top 8 of the Regional Championships back in May last year, which is how I qualified for Chicago. Since then, Bloomburrow and Duskmourn: House of Horror (and Foundations) have both been released, and they have been highly impactful sets that have changed the format significantly since I had last played it. This meant that I had to learn the format from scratch.

The timing of this Pro Tour was a bit unusual, in that the set we were going to draft, Aetherdrift, wasn’t going to be released until a week before the event. This meant that as a team, we decided to focus solely on constructed until we got to the testing house a week prior to the tournament, and then we’d focus almost solely on draft once we were all together and could organize eight-person pod drafts.

My constructed preparation started around mid-December, and for the first month I basically tried every deck in the format, playing a few leagues with each deck to get a full understanding of the metagame. I also tried to mix up my lists just to get a feel of everything. After the Christmas break, we also started organizing weekly team meetings over a video call, where we would all share what we had been playing over the past week, our learnings, and what each of us wanted to focus on/some key matchups we needed to test as a team over the coming week.

These weeks of testing were a lot of fun!

There were big metagame shifts happening each week, which was enjoyable to experience in real-time. For example, Esper Pixie didn’t really exist as a deck until the end of December but then quickly exploded in popularity, and then the Spotlight Series Atlanta in early January brought with it decks like Gruul Leyline and Dimir Bounce, which hadn’t existed up to that point.

Amidst all this, decks like Azorius Omniscience also popped up, which I believe was created by an Italian team that had been crushing local RCQs and online events with the deck.

Once Aetherdrift spoilers started to come out, we swapped over to testing on Cockatrice, so that we could experiment with the new cards before they were officially released. As we started playing with the new cards, it became clear that Aetherdrift would bring with it some strong additions to existing decks (for example Ride’s End was a big gain for any white-based midrange or control deck like Domain), but that it likely wouldn’t be having as big of an impact as the prior two expansions, Bloomburrow and Duskmourn, had on the format.

By the time we reached mid-February and I was getting ready to hop on a plane to Chicago, I was fairly settled on the Azorius Oculus deck.

I thought the red-aggro decks (Gruul Prowess and Mono Red) were powerful and likely the best decks, but I simply couldn’t get to a point where I felt I was playing them at a competent enough level.

I quickly dismissed the “big” white midrange/control decks like Domain and Mono White Tokens, as I don’t enjoy the play-style of those types of decks and I would get too stressed about going to time in a paper-event.

At one point I was quite high on Dimir Midrange, but the formation and subsequent explosion of the Bounce decks (Eper Pixie, Dimir Bounce) made the traditional Dimir deck a poor choice as you were behind against those matchups as they were able to reliably out-grind you.

The Bounce decks were strong, but my issue with them was that I was quite confident Esper Pixie was better than Dimir Bounce, except I hated Esper’s manabase. I dismissed Jeskai Convoke and Jeskai Oculus for the same reason – I despise these three-colour manabases that rely heavily on Fastlands (aka unstable land drops past turn three) and Painlands (costly when red aggro decks are the most popular archetype in the format).

Once I accounted for all of this, there simply weren’t many decks left in the format! I did test a lot of the Azorius Omniscience deck and enjoyed it, but ultimately dismissed it as I felt it was too inconsistent. The biggest mistake I made in my preparation was over this – I had played the deck mostly around mid-January before dismissing it, and then I didn’t re-visit it once Aetherdrift came out and brought with it Stock Up (a massive addition to the deck) and the increase in Domain leading up to the Pro Tour made the deck’s positioning much better.

Nonetheless, essentially by the process of elimination, Azorius Oculus was my main choice heading into the testing house, which I was happy about because while I didn’t think the deck was notably well positioned or powerful, I just loved playing it and it definitely fit my play-style.

Testing House in Chicago

Our testing house was from Friday prior to the Pro Tour, which due to the time difference meant that I was going to be leaving New Zealand in the early-afternoon on Friday, and after over twenty hours of travelling, I would arrive in Chicago in the early-evening on Friday!

For a few days leading up to my departure, a few members of the team (most notably Alex, Arch, Benton and Michele) had been working extensively on a new combo deck based around Insidious Roots. The deck had gained a lot with the release of Molt Tender and Wastewood Verge from Aetherdrift, and their list had become much better tuned in the span of a few days.

They felt that the deck had a lot of potential, and that if as a team we were to swap to it last minute, it would be difficult to find the cards for it as the deck was mostly a combination of commons and uncommons that weren’t played in any other archetype. Therefore, on the way to the airport, I quickly scrambled to order all of the cards I needed for the deck using the airport’s unreliable WiFi, and then Calcano went even further by just buying out two of the big vendors that were coming to MagicCon.

When I got to the house on Friday, I immediately started testing against this new Insidious Roots deck. Sitting from the other side, the deck did seem powerful, but the matchup was also easy for Azorius Oculus, as we had maindeck Temporary Lockdowns and they didn’t have a way to stop our flying creatures.

The next day, I woke up early in the morning and went for a walk around the neighborhood. It was about -20°C (around -4°F), which is much colder than it gets back home. I had been in snow before, like when I travelled Europe in winter, but never this cold. Thankfully, with enough layers on, it’s manageable, and the walk was lovely as the snow was soft and looked beautiful in the sun.

Our focus for the first day was on constructed, and we ran our traditional in-house tournament. This is where we split into two pods, and we put each of the format’s top decks into both pods, while also putting in the “team decks”, in this case Insidious Roots, Boros Convoke and Azorius Oculus, into the pods as well, and we play against each other round-robin style within each pod, before then playing the mirror match against the player from the other pod.

Following the tournament, we then went through the results and the two players who had played the given archetype presented their learnings and how they felt about the deck. The sample size of matches played were obviously small, so instead of focusing on the actual results, we were mostly concentrating on what we learnt and how we felt.

For example, I actually had the best record of the day, going 6-1 with Azorius Oculus (humble brags!), but the takeaway from the tournament was that the deck was going to be poorly positioned for the Pro Tour as we were now expecting Domain to be one of the biggest decks and it had a very poor matchup against it.

On the flip side, the biggest learning we had from the day was that Domain was powerful – the manabase improved slightly with more Verge lands, but more importantly, Ride’s End was a big addition to the deck as it helped improve its aggro matchups and was another cheap removal spell that triggers Up the Beanstalk.

From the Oculus perspective, Ride’s End single-handedly made the matchup much harder as they had another cheap, exile removal spell to complement their Leyline Bindings. The Insidious Roots deck also performed reasonably well, but there was a glaring problem – the deck looked to have a poor matchup against Gruul Prowess (and red aggro decks in general). Since we expected Gruul to be the most played deck, we had to solve this issue.

When we polled the team at the end of the day about what deck they would submit if the event was tomorrow, the results were as follows:

7 Insidious Roots
4 Domain
2 Gruul Prowess
2 Azorius Oculus
1 Boros/Jeskai Convoke

Over the next couple of days, the Insidious Roots players worked hard on the deck, but ultimately couldn’t fix the matchup against the red aggro decks, and inevitably more and more of the players who were initially on the deck moved off it.

They largely swapped to Domain, which looked as promising as ever and people felt it was an easier deck to swap to without much experience compared to a deck like Gruul Prowess or Azorius Oculus.

As for myself, I was happily locked on Azorius Oculus already, and while I understood the deck’s positioning wasn’t going to be good, I felt comfortable and confident in my ability to play the deck well. My main focus was on testing the Domain and Gruul Prowess matchups as much as I could – I needed to see if I could improve the Domain matchup, and I needed to re-visit the Gruul Prowess matchup because that’s the deck that has the biggest delta in playskill between top players and those you face on Magic Online.

We weren’t able to “fix” the Domain matchup, but we did manage to improve it a bit by coming up with Break the Spell as the plan. Our key learnings from the matchup was that while Rest in Peace was brutal, and Zur, Eternal Schemer was unbeatable, what we were actually losing to was Up the Beanstalk.

The way for us to beat Domain was to essentially have them stumble, which they often do if they don’t have Beanstalk, and so we had to make sure they couldn’t smooth their draws with it. Zur, Eternal Schemer was what we were losing to, but that was because Up the Beanstalk had ensured they had stabilized to the point that Zur could take over the game.

The major lightbulb moment for us was when we realized we were more scared of an Up the Beanstalk on turn two than a Rest in Peace. Break the Spell was fantastic for dealing with Up the Beanstalk (and Rest in Peace), as it was only one-mana, and we could answer it on turn one on the draw and then play a cantrip on turn two.

We also played a lot against Mogged on Gruul Prowess, who is likely one of the top Gruul players in the world, and the matchup felt extremely even (and he agreed from the other side), which we were happy about. This meant that we were probably slightly ahead against non-elite Gruul players. We also found that we liked having two copies of Break the Spell in this matchup on the draw, as it could answer Innkeeper’s Talent on turn one and also destroy the role token from Monstrous Rage (which draws us a card in the process).

In the end, our team’s final deck choices were as follows:

5 Domain

4 Azorius Oculus

3 Gruul Prowess

1 Insidious Roots

1 Esper Pixie

1 Temur Lands

1 Boros Convoke

As mentioned at the beginning, because of the timing of the release of Aetherdrift, our main focus in the house was on limited, and we did thirteen drafts across Sunday to Wednesday.

As per usual, Eduardo was our limited captain, and we started off with an initial limited meeting on Saturday evening to get everyone up to speed on the format. We then drafted a bunch across Sunday to Tuesday, then once decklists for constructed were all submitted on Tuesday evening, we focused solely on drafting on Wednesday, with a final limited meeting by Eduardo on Wednesday evening.

I felt that our limited preparation was excellent, and we all had a thorough understanding of the format. Going into the drafts, it seemed that Green was the “obvious” best color, but we quickly realized that the Mardu-coloured “Start Your Engine” decks were also powerful.

When we looked at the 17 Lands data, we realized that the main reason behind our team liking these Mardu decks versus the data, which showed poor win rates for these archetypes on 17 Lands, was that we were drafting them quite differently – we were building them to be more lean and low to the ground.

It was also important for all of us to learn how to draft the non-Green decks, as we knew they would be significantly over-drafted at the Pro Tour due to the short window between the release of the set and the event.

In addition to the Mardu-colour pairs, I also liked the Esper Artifacts deck. I wanted to avoid being straight Dimir or Azorius, as I felt that you did need to play the payoff cards across the three colors for the deck to be viable, but the archetype’s mana was good as long as you prioritized the dual-lands (which we felt was very important to do in this format).

In fact, if I could pick up some Starting Columns, I was much more likely to be four or five colors than I was straight two-colours in this archetype. For reference, this was a deck I 3-0’d a draft with at the house.

If you want to learn more about the Aetherdrift limited format and our team’s take on it, I highly recommend you check out this video by Eduardo, where he goes over our team’s learnings and our team’s understanding of the format.

As always, the testing house was a lot of fun, and we all had a great time. The house we had was fantastic and actually had good Wi-Fi (this is usually an issue in these big Airbnbs), and we were well organized with a clear agenda outlined for each day with a morning meeting to kick us off and an evening review to share all of our learnings from the day.

One of the key highlights this time around was that we opted to cook all of our meals instead of getting UberEats or going out to restaurants. This helped us save money and time, but most importantly, it meant that we were eating healthy throughout the week. We had a set cooking and cleaning roster that we organized prior to the house, and we did all of our grocery shopping on the first day based on that plan.

On one of the earlier days, Connor, Calcano and I made a small snowman in the garden, which was a lot of fun for Connor and me as we had never done that before. It was cold enough that by the time we left the following Thursday, the snowman was still there!

Pro Tour Aetherdrift – Day 1

On Thursday, we checked out of our Airbnb that was in the suburbs, and moved to another Airbnb within walking distance to the venue. I grabbed lunch with a friend, chilled for a few hours walking around Chinatown, then went to the Players’ Party in the evening for registration and had some dinner there. Once we got back, we opened the booster packs we got from registration and discussed the picks before heading to bed early.

My first draft pod on Friday had fellow teammate Andrea Mengucci in it, but otherwise I didn’t recognize many of the other players in the pod.

I drafted a solid Orzhov deck, that felt like a 2-1 deck based on the power level of the draft. In the first round, I unfortunately went to time against a good Simic deck with multiple bombs, before coming back in the second round to beat a Boros deck. Going into the final round, I was hoping to get paired down to the 1-1 player, but instead got paired up to Mengucci, who was 2-0, and lost to his Temur deck in three games.

I finished the draft with an awkward 1-1-1 record.

It was now time for constructed, and I was extremely excited to get to battle with Azorius Oculus! You can read all about the deck in my previous article, which can be found here.

The constructed portion started quite weirdly for me, as my first four matches were against Gruul decks – two Prowess and two Delirium. I split the matches, beating one of each, and headed into the final round with a 3-3-1 score. This meant I needed to win the final match to make Day 2.

I got paired against Richie, my friendly opponent from the second round of the draft, who was on an innovative build of Golgari Midrange featuring Lumbering Worldwagon and Bristlebud Farmer. I quickly lost the first game, then won an extremely close second game where he managed to exile my first three copies of Abhorrent Oculus, and I had to dig hard for more creatures and ended up winning with just two cards left in my library after finding my exact third copy of Negate for a crucial Gix’s Command, which would have won him the game had it resolved.

In the third game, I had a great hand and was able to get Abhorrent Oculus into play on turn three with Negate backup. The match wasn’t great for my heart, but I managed to make it through to Day 2! After the event, we went to a great Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. I ate way too much, then passed out shortly after getting back to the Airbnb.

Pro Tour Aetherdrift – Day 2

My Day 2 draft pod was tough – I had Theo Jung, Jesse Hampton, Christoffer Larsen and my teammate Connor McGillivray in it. I drafted a good Esper Artifacts deck, which is my favorite archetype in this format.

In my first round I paired against Jesse Hampton, one of the best limited players in the world and the limited captain for Team Handshake. I won in three close games against his Gruul deck, which featured Pyrewood Gearhulk.

I then lost to Julian David from Canada and his fantastic Selesnya deck, before pairing against Christoffer Larsen in the final round. He had a very defensive Simic deck that was based around his two copies of Aether Syphon, which was exactly the matchup that my deck was weak to, as in these blue midrange mirrors the Syphon (and Riverchurn Monument) are far-and-away the best cards. I lost in two quick games.

After my match against Christoffer, we sat around and just caught up on life for about thirty minutes, and that was one of the highlights for me from the event. We’re not close friends, but we do try to quickly catch up with one another when we see each other at a tournament like this, and we talked about me getting married while he’s changed careers and had a kid with a second one coming soon, which is fantastic all around but very different to what we used to talk about back in 2017/2018 when we would regularly team draft together on the Sunday after the Pro Tour!

It was now time to go back to constructed, where I continued my string of losses, losing to Selesnya Cage and Domain (my teammate Connor) in back-to-back rounds. I was now sitting at 5-7-1, so I wasn’t playing for much, but I did want to put up a good showing with Oculus as I did feel strongly about the deck. I managed to get my act together and won my final three matches against Dimir Midrange, Mono White Tokens and Esper Pixie.

Overall, I finished 8-7-1, coming 126th out of 350 players. Although it wasn’t a great finish, and I was disappointed with how I did in limited, I was happy to go 6-4 with Azorius Oculus and had an incredible time all-around!

On Sunday, I joined the single-elimination Standard PTQ, which abruptly came to an end in the second round. I spent the rest of the day checking out the rest of the MagicCon and picked up some nice tokens from the various artists that were there. I also picked up a Collector’s Edition Time Walk, my first piece on my journey to completing the Power 9 for my Old School deck!

Retrospective Bachelor Party

Back in November last year, my (now) wife and I eloped to South Korea and got married after we stumbled across some cheap flights and spontaneously decided to get engaged and then get married a few weeks later on our trip. This meant that I never had the opportunity to do a proper bachelor party as it was all very rushed and organized last minute.

Fortunately, a large number of the friends I’d made from Magic over the past decade were qualified or coming to Chicago, so we decided to organize a “retrospective” bachelor party after the Pro Tour. I set up a Facebook chat and invited everyone, then left the chat so they could organize it all without me knowing about it.

Overall, they did a brilliant job of organizing a really enjoyable day! We started off with breakfast at the famous Original Pancake House, then we went to a board games bar and had some drinks and a light lunch while we played the various games they had.

After lunch, we did an escape room, which had this cool setup where we split into three groups, and we were all simultaneously solving the same case. We then went to a different venue to play shuffleboard, which most of us were pretty poor at but that leveled the playing field, before grabbing dinner and then ending the night at a karaoke bar, which I would be highly surprised if it wasn’t a front for some shady business. I will never get sick of signing Sk8er Boi at the top of my lungs!

The Aftermath

I opted to stay in Chicago until Wednesday to do a bit more sightseeing by myself, and I enjoyed checking out the city! Chicago’s got a tough, no-nonsense vibe but still feels friendly and down-to-earth, like it’s made for the people who live there. I particularly enjoyed walking around the lakefront.

I hope you enjoyed this article as I went in-depth about what it’s like to prepare for a major tournament with a testing team, and what the experience is like to compete in one of them! In my next article, I will be going over my Regional Championships experience, which happened just two weeks after the Pro Tour, so be sure to check that out if you enjoyed reading this one!

Till next time!

Zen Miyaji-Thorne

@mtgzen on X

About the Author

Zen Miyaji-Thorne is a seasoned writer and mainstay on the Three for One Trading writing team. He is an avid Eternal player from Auckland, New Zealand and enjoys competing in local Legacy events and playing Old School over webcam with friends.

Previously, he was a Silver Pro for multiple years and his results included five Grand Prix Top 8s, a 27th place at Pro Tour Amonkhet, three consecutive online Regional PTQ wins, and he co-created the Modern Dredge deck.

Nowadays though, he primarily plays Legacy, his favorite format, but he also branches out into Pioneer and Modern.