Have you had the pleasure of casting Painful Truths in draft? Oh it feels so good. Have you suffered through having some painful truths about competitive Magic rubbed in your face? Oh it feels so bad. I should have made Top Eight of the online sealed PTQ last weekend. I didn’t, it is my fault, and I am still burning up about it.
Here’s the crazy weird pool deck I built out of a pool with insane power concentrated at the top end and awkward filler among the rest of the cards:
Survive and Win
Maybe I should have played green-white? Here’s what that would look like:
The Safe Bet
It has enough defense to get my to my dominant late game, but I don’t know. I felt blue offered plenty of defense in Tightening Coils, Tide Drifter, and two Incubator Drones, with the reward being Roil Spout and Coastal Discovery. Blue also demands less mana commitment, opening the door to splash Radiant Flames, Touch of the Void, and the two Boiling Earth in the sideboard. Overall, I think the sweeper plan works better in a deck with more interactive spells than one with many small creatures.
It’s interesting how the two colorless lands change in value between the decks. I prefer Spawning Bed, which fills the late ramp slot into Ulamog in the absence of the green scion makers, over Shrine of the Forsaken Gods. Spawning Bed is a better card on its own, which is what you want in Sealed.
Anyway, I felt great about my chances to make Top Eight with this powerful deck. Sweepers and expensive bombs provide an extremely powerful Sealed strategy. I would need tight play and some luck to get there, but that’s always true.
Round one started with a nightmare. My opponent had nut draws with tons of scions into overruns. If I had drawn a sweeper ever, I would have crushed, and after board I was even more prepared with the two Boiling Earth. I felt like a 70% favorite in the matchup, but sometimes they massively outdraw you and you lose. Starting 0-1 is horrible, but the last time I won a PTQ I started the same way and never lost again. When I snagged the round two bye, I felt the wind at my back.
I should have entered round six of eight at 4-1 and poised to play some fantastic Magic and close out my Swiss run. After incredibly tight play to stabilize at three life in game three of round five, trading like a madman and then awakening for four straight turns, I made one horrible mistake and ended my run. This was exactly what my deck was supposed to do, I visualized the plan and executed. Until I nodded, Homer-style.
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe!
Through all of the mental resources expended to get there, I forgot my opponent still had an uncracked Blighted Woodland. His From Beyond forced me to keep attacking so he would chump rather than build an army that could get in the last points of damage. So when my opponent was at two life, I awakened Coastal Discovery, making a 4/4 land to go with my 11/11 land, and thought attacking them into his Valakut Predator plus lone scion token was the way to go. As the now-6/6 predator ate my 4/4 land and the scion chumped the 11/11, I knew the two cards he’d been holding forever contained the land for a lethal predator attack and I wanted to puke.
Maybe I should have spread my awakens a turn earlier so that both my lands would trump Valakut Predator plus Blighted Woodland, if I had remembered that land across the table. That might have slowed my clock and allowed him not to chump block on one of the turns where I fought back. It was twenty to three on life when I turned the corner, so I needed big chunks of damage. Regardless, I had Ulamog in hand (which also encourages awakening onto a single land) and I drew Incubator Drone off Coastal Discovery. That should have been enough to win. I could have waited a turn, even giving him a “free” scion off From Beyond that didn’t have to chump. But he could always draw Touch of the Void. Every draw step was a risk. My mind said attack and press, keep his board clear. It was so much information and such a tough match that the Blighted Woodland slipped my notice and I walked into my own doom.
I won the next two rounds before coming up short in round eight to end at 5-3, out of the top 32 minimum prize on tiebreakers. My round five opponent made top eight off the gift victory I gave him. Other than my one big mistake, I felt great. But I punted once when I could not afford to punt, and nothing else I did mattered. How’s that for some Painful Truths?
Here’s the painfulest of truths: if you want to win a PTQ (or any big tournament) you have to win all the long close games. You can’t give away value. You can’t miss a key interaction on board. It is not enough to play tightly and brilliantly for 17 of 18 turns. Doing what I did, replicating it consistently in every tournament over a season, will yield high finishes and respectable win percentages. But it won’t win a tournament. The competition is too tough, and the variance over eight or twelve or sixteen rounds will show up. Your margin for unforced errors is almost nonexistent.
When you have the chance to win a PTQ, when you bring your A game, when your sealed pool shows up to play or you read the constructed metagame perfectly, when the stars are aligned—those are rare moments that you have to seize. If you stumble once, it will burn. You’ll wish it meant you could draw three cards.
Carrie O’Hara is Editor-in-Chief of Hipsters of the Coast.