Our roster was as follows:

Alex Rohan – United Kingdom

Andre Judd – USA

Ben Kemp – Australia

Charalampos Kikidis (Mogged) – Greece

Christian Calcano – USA

Derek Blaiotta – USA

Dom Harvey – Canada

Hunk Yu – Taiwan

Jack Potter (House) – Canada

Julian Jakobovits (Jujubean) – USA

Lee Shi Tian – Hong Kong

Marco Del Pivo – Italy

Michael Russell – Australia

Miguel Castro – Spain

Muhan Yu (Beenew) – China

Sean Goddard – United Kingdom

Seb Rohan – United Kingdom

Toni Martos – Spain

Yung-Ming Huang – Taiwan

Zen Takahashi – New Zealand

Andrea Mengucci – Italy (Not qualified, but helped us and joined us in the testing house)

Eduardo Sajgalick – Canada (Not qualified, but helped us and joined us in the testing house)

Joseph Karani – Canada (Not qualified, but helped us online)

Nick Price – Philippines (Had to defer due to visa, but helped us online)

William Poor – New Zealand (Not qualified, but helped us online)

The big difference for us this time around was the addition of the “Zoomers”, the term commonly used to refer to a group of young, up-and-coming players who have successfully made a name for themselves during the pandemic-era by putting up great results in the online tournaments.

It was enjoyable to work with these players – although there was a bit of naivety around travel logistics and getting familiar with playing cards in paper, all of them were extremely dedicated and hard-working, and it was clear just how much raw talent they all have. We’re already starting to see this next generation of players put up good results on the Pro Tour scene, and I’m excited to see where they can take it over the next few years! 

Luckily for me, this plan mostly worked out. I spent the first two weeks just going through MTG Goldfish and trying all the decks that I thought were both good and looked interesting to me.

After trying seven different decks (5c Creativity, Burn, Domain Zoo, Dredge, Living End, Rakdos Scam, Temur Rhinos), I quickly settled on Domain Zoo and Living End – they were the decks I was winning with the most, but also enjoyed playing.

Between the two, I then quickly discarded Domain Zoo after losing to its manabase too many times, and so I found myself locked on Living End fairly early. This was also helped by the fact that my teammate, Alex Rohan, was also quite high on the deck, and it felt like we had quickly made some improvements on the stock list while putting up promising results online, which helped boost my confidence with the deck.

From there, I just spent the next few weeks before LOTR was released just playing as much Living End as I could to understand the deck better. Most of my preparation was playing matchup sets versus my teammates, which was significantly more useful than just playing Magic Online leagues.

I cannot stress enough just how much better your preparation is when you play against top players and then discuss your thoughts with them right after you’ve played.

My plan to stop testing Modern once LOTR came out didn’t quite work out as the format did in fact change significantly with the set, so I ended up having to revisit a lot of matchup sets such as Rakdos Scam, 4c Omnath and Mono Green Tron, while also testing against the new Dimir Midrange deck. 

This was a fairly turbulent period to be a Living End player, as the release of the landcyclers improved the deck, but then it put it onto everyone’s radar and I felt that the massive increase in hate made the deck worse positioned than prior, even with the added consistency of the new cards.

Still, I opted to stubbornly stick by the deck throughout this period, and by the time the Pro Tour came around, I felt better as I now had a lot of practice playing against the wide variety of hate cards that were played, but also the deck had fallen in numbers as everyone’s attention were now centered on the rise of Rakdos Scam and Mono Green Tron. I have put together a comprehensive deck guide on Living End, which you can find right here!

Our preparation started with each of us drafting on Magic Online and Arena, and we would share our draft logs and findings over Discord. Personally, I was winning the most with Rakdos and Dimir, followed by Izzet. I found black to actively be the best color, and I was almost always trying to draft it.

My plan was to basically force the Grixis colors – if black was being cut, I would move into Izzet, while if I saw a key white or green uncommon, or a premium gold card from Orzhov or Golgari late in pack one, I could pivot into one of those pairs. Overall, I was happy to draft any of the black color pairs or Izzet. 

However, once we started to arrange single elimination drafts on Magic Online within our team, and in our pod drafts at the testing house, we quickly identified that black was difficult to draft when everyone in the table was aware of how good it is (which isn’t necessarily the case in leagues on MODO or in the Arena ladder).

Black is deep as a color, but it isn’t deep enough to support five or six drafters sitting in a row.

We also identified that two-drop creatures were actually quite hard to come by in the format. Everyone knew how important two-drops were due to ring tempting and the proactive nature of the format, but the general quality of the two-drops across the board meant that people were taking it highly even without prioritizing them specifically, and therefore in the early drafts, many of us ended up with not enough early plays in our decks.

This led to an interesting development, as we expected people at the Pro Tour would also be aware of just how good black was, and also how important the two-drops are, so we expected they would prioritize both of these.

However, since there are few large testing teams at the Pro Tour nowadays, we also expected that the majority of players’ preparations would be solely from online drafts, where they likely wouldn’t have had to fight very hard to end up with both these things.

Therefore, our approach to this limited format was to figure out how we could draft our seat in the context that people were going to be fighting over the black cards and the two-drop creatures.

We quickly identified that Izzet was the obvious answer. This became glaringly clear when Eduardo 3-0’d the first three drafts he played in at the testing house with Izzet, while the rest of us were fighting over the black cards. Izzet had a few distinctive advantages:

1.  You weren’t going to be fighting over the black cards, and often people prioritized black cards in the first few picks to stay open, which meant you were passed premium blue or red cards that they chose to take a slightly worse black card over.
2. The most important Izzet cards, Fiery Inscription and Gandalf’s Sanction, didn’t fit into the other blue or red decks.
3. Although two-drops are important in Izzet, you could often fill that slot with a spell like Glorious Gale or Smite the Deathless if you didn’t have enough, and you could pick up Erebor Flamesmiths somewhat easily, as it didn’t fit into other red decks.

We also expected Izzet wouldn’t be drafted too much because it was just quite a hard archetype to draft – if your deck didn’t come together, it could often play out quite poorly. Thankfully, though, we had Eduardo to teach us all the different niche “combos” that we could draft around if we didn’t manage to pick up Fiery Inscriptions or Gandalf’s Sanctions. 

The other archetype we identified to be well positioned was Orzhov. When people drafted black, they usually wanted to be in Rakdos or Dimir, as those were the best black archetypes.

We found that white was often quite open, as it didn’t really pair well with the other colors – Boros was decent, but Azorius and Selesnya were both weak. Although white’s commons aren’t very deep, it has many premium uncommons like Samwise the Stouthearted and Rosie Cotton of South Lane, and they would often go later than they should.

The major advantage white had, though, was that it had many filler two-drop creatures. Cards like Took Reaper and East-Mark Cavalier aren’t good by any means, but they fill the curve when necessary. These ring tempting black decks usually wanted five or six two-drop creatures, and with Rakdos or Dimir, that was often difficult to come by, but it was never really an issue if you were in Orzhov. 

On Wednesday evening, the last night at our testing house, we had our limited meeting that was led by Eduardo. I did lose a lot in the drafts in the testing house, but I felt more confident after the meeting, because I believed we developed a good understanding of the format. 

One thing Eduardo did emphasize was that green was just bad and should be avoided. At some point, we started to like Golgari as cards like Old-Man Willow were being passed really late, but we found the green decks were doing terribly in the house drafts even when it was wide open.

Simply put, they just struggled too much against the blue decks or decks that went wide (Orzhov/Boros), and that was just too much of the format.

At Minneapolis, I didn’t take part in the team’s testing house, as I wanted to minimize the time I took off work. However, throughout the whole tournament, I was battling jet lag, and it affected my tournament massively, so this time around I decided to arrive a week early to give myself enough time to get used to the change in time zones. 

I departed New Zealand on Saturday morning, and after about forty hours of traveling, I arrived on Sunday morning in Barcelona. Since our check-in wasn’t until the evening, a couple of us decided to check out the city and play tourist.

Although it was only a few hours, we made the most of it, as we checked out the Gothic Quarter, La Rambla, Casa Batlló and La Sagrada Familia. It was my second time visiting the iconic Catholic Church, and it still shocked me just how stunning the interior was. 

Our actual Airbnb was a massive mansion in a small town, two hours out from the city. There were some nice local restaurants that we frequented for lunch, and one supermarket, which we went to everyday, to stock up on snacks, pizzas, jamon and drinks. 

The house was amazing – it had lots of playing space, a pool, and two tables outside that were perfectly sized for drafts! It was also awesome to get to catch up with my former MTG Mint Card teammates – many of us hadn’t seen each other in a few years due to the pandemic, so it was like a little reunion party!

We also had everyone bring snacks from their countries, which with the variety of nationalities we had in our team, led to an awesome treasure trove of snacks.

For a house with twenty guys, we also surprisingly did a good job of keeping it clean, though I did force people to tidy up the kitchen multiple times a day and whoever went 0-3 in the draft had to tidy up the table and have it clean and sorted before the next draft started.

The food at the party was quite good – there was much more range than in Minneapolis, which was just tacos. The highlight for me was this great seafood dish, but it unfortunately had quite a lot of squid in it, which I am mildly allergic to.

I debated for a while whether I should eat it or not, but I ultimately decided to gamble on it and had some.

I think if I ate just a small plate, it would have been okay, but I enjoyed it so much that I had two more plates, and I ended up with a terrible headache and my tongue was starting to go numb, so I went back to the hotel and took some panadol and ibuprofen, and went to bed early.

Overall, my deck was decent, but was short on playables. The top five cards of my deck were quite strong, but the bottom five were actively bad. Thankfully, I did have double Quarrel’s End to try to loot away the bad cards. After the draft finished, I expected this to go 2-1 or 1-2. 

I started with a win over a strong Orzhov deck, and I was pleased with how I played. In the second round, I had a feature match against Allen Wu (though unfortunately not covered on camera), and ended up losing to his even stronger Orzhov deck with the Witch-King of Angmar that I passed to him. 

In the third round, I was paired against Franck Pappas, who is better known as “O_danielakos” on Magic Online.

I’ve been a big fan of his for a long time, so it was nice to meet him in-person, and he was extremely kind and respectful. I ended up losing in three close games, which was frustrating as he was on a three-color green ramp deck – this is exactly the type of deck Izzet is supposed to prey on. 

We had a quick lunch break, and then we were onto the Modern portion. My first match was the Living End mirror, and after quickly losing the first game, I sat there with my sideboard in hand, thinking that this might be a fairly short day. Thankfully, though, in both game two and three, I opened with one of my two Leyline of the Voids and won easily. 

From there, the Modern rounds went smoothly, as I defeated Izzet Breach, Amulet Titan, Golgari Yawgmoth and Mono Green Tron to go 5-0 in the Modern portion and finish the day at 6-2.

I felt like I got fairly lucky throughout my games, but I also played well and thought that I navigated some difficult situations and took some risks that paid off. After starting 1-2, I couldn’t ask for a better result!

The team had also done really well overall. We had Calcano at 7-1, Seb at 6-1-1, and multiple of us at 6-2. We went out to a decent Asian buffet for dinner, and I went to bed feeling happy and stuffed from a good day of eating and Magic. 

Heading into Day 2, my goal was to go 4-4, as that would have qualified me for the Pro Tour in Chicago next year. If I managed to go 5-3 to finish 11-5, that would have been the gravy on top, as it would have qualified me for the next two Pro Tours thanks to the new Adjusted Match Points system.

As it turned out, Izzet was quite open, and I even got passed two Bilbo, Retired Burglar – the second one coming seventh pick in the third pack! I was happy with my deck, and I expected it to go 2-1, or 3-0 if I was lucky!

I won my first two rounds fairly swiftly, beating an Orzhov and Dimir. The Orzhov deck was quite strong with two copies of Denethor, Ruling Steward, but thankfully my opponent never saw them. In the third round, playing in the “finals” of the draft, I was paired against Toru Inoue, who I beat in the last round of Modern the day before. I lost in two tight games, which was quite frustrating as both games we entered a topdeck war where I was slightly ahead, but I came out of it worse. 

My seven match winning streak from 1-2 had now come to an end, and I was sitting at 8-3 heading into the Modern portion.

It was pretty clear what I was playing for – 2-3 for another Pro Tour invite, 3-2 for two Pro Tour invites and 4-1 for Top 8.

Unfortunately though, while I ran hotter than the sun in the Modern portion the day before, this time it couldn’t get much worse as my draws just failed to come together on multiple occasions. I started off by losing to Jake Beardsley, the eventual Pro Tour champion, on Rakdos Scam. I was then paired against Daniel Goetschel on 4c Rhinos, which had a clever sideboard plan that involved boarding out all their Crashing Footfalls and boarding into Dannith Magistrates, and this got me good in both of the post-board games. 

In round 14, I got paired against Dimir Control, and again won game one convincingly, but just couldn’t battle through all his counterspells in the two post-board games. All was not lost though, as I did manage to pick up a win the following round against Rakos Scam, which set me up for a final round where I was playing for another Pro Tour invite. However, I was stopped in my tracks by Ben Jones, who was on the same 4c Rhinos deck as Daniel from a few rounds prior. That matchup just felt nightmarish post-board.

After starting 8-2, finding yourself at 9-7 just a few hours later is a tough pill to swallow, but highlights the reality of just how difficult the Pro Tour is.

All these players are absolutely world-class, especially on day two, and no victory ever comes easily. At this level, it feels like if you make even a minor mistake, your opponent will capitalize on it and you can lose the game because of it. It’s difficult to maintain your concentration and playskill through sixteen grueling rounds, and I think one of the major aspects that separates the top players at the Pro Tour to myself is that ability to maintain that the whole way through. 

However, this negative feeling didn’t last long at all, as right after I finished my match, I found out Pivo and Calcano had both secured a spot in the Top 8 of the Pro Tour! I then got to watch a third teammate, Dom, manage to miraculously make the Top 8 after one of the other feature matches playing for Top 8 went to time and neither player wanted to concede, opening up the eighth place spot for Dom to sneak into!

We were originally planning to have our team dinner on Saturday night, but since three teammates made the Top 8 and they all understandably wanted to get some rest, we decided to postpone it till the next day. Instead, a bunch of us decided to attend the MagicCon Barcelona Party, which featured Elijah Wood from Lord of the Rings as a DJ! 

We quickly got some McDonalds and then all hopped into an Uber and headed to the nightclub right by the beach where the party was held. To be totally honest, the music from Elijah and his partner wasn’t really my cup of tea, but having some drinks and dancing with the guys was a great way to decompress after an exhausting day! 

Once we came out of the club, in our half-drunken state, we decided to have a sprinting race across the carpark. I managed to edge out Mogged, which I was surprised by as he looked quite fit, but then I got soundly beaten by Jujubean, which I was also surprised by as I just assumed he just sat at home playing Magic Online all day. 

When we decided to go to the party the night before, we all knew this was going to come at a cost, and that was going to be feeling awful as we woke up on a few hours of sleep and walked to the venue for the Pro Tour Qualifier at 9am. In Minneapolis, I managed to Top 4 the event, which qualified me for Barcelona in the first place, but this time around it was obvious that wasn’t going to happen. 

The rest of the day involved watching Dom and Calcano in the Top 8 of the Pro Tour, as Dom came down in the semifinals while Calcano lost in the finals in five close games. I’ve been teammates with Calcano for seven years now, and he’s one of my favorite people that I’ve met through Magic.

I don’t think I’ve ever rooted harder for someone in the finals of a Pro Tour, and it was gutting to see him come up just short.

Once the Pro Tour was all over, we headed to a great burger joint and celebrated our amazing weekend over a team dinner.

While we felt that our preparation for the tournament was much better than it was in Minneapolis, I don’t think any of us would have imagined we would put three people into the Top 8 and put up multiple other solid finishes.

During dinner, Mogged came in and also told us he managed to take down the Pro Tour Qualifier, so he was now un-retired, after announcing his retirement from Magic just 48 hours prior when he failed to make Day 2.

After dinner, we fired off another team draft, this time in the hotel lobby. “Team Desolate”, consisting of Andre, Jujubean and myself, was up against Dom, Derek and Sean. When we sat down for our first round and saw that their team had no one in black with Dom on UG Scry, we knew it was going to be a fairly one-sided affair, and that’s exactly how it played out. I’m glad Dom was feeling generous after winning big at the Pro Tour, and helped bring some joy to the team whose name reflected how they were each feeling right at that moment. 

These Sunday team drafts are truly the highlight of the Pro Tour experience, and it’s these kinds of moments that I’ll look back on fondly.