2024 S3 MOCS Tournament Report

2025-01-19

It’s hard to write something entertaining and even harder to write something useful. I’m wary of writing because everyone overly narrativizes the things that happen to them as is and it feels self-indulgent but at the same time am convinced there is significant value to be had in logging what past you was thinking. So with that being said in this document I will cover my experience competing in the most recent MOCS.

Qualifying: Отдых - привилегия слепых

The MOCS circuit is brutal. You need an ungodly amount of QPs you need to play all events, there’s barely any money in it, the invite equity for primary OP rounds to zero, and somehow on top of all that the level of competition is quite high. So naturally when I see someone qualify for the MOCS via leaderboard I conclude that they are quite good and when I see myself do it I conclude that I got lucky. The truth is probably somewhere in middle but I can say for a fact that I was not playing towards the end of the season and was struggling with the pressure produced by the leaderboard race. With my final top8 I was effectively locked but could not bring myself to celebrate early and in the week I had to wait for official confirmation lost any energy I could have used for that so in the end qualifying didn’t really register as a significant event in my mind besides the fact that I had finally gotten this camel off my back.

Preparing: a shadow crew of misfits egging you on

I had never interacted with Fer prior to this but he seemed like the natural choice for me to collaborate with especially with Julian vouching for him. We had a conversation about what each of us were expecting and decided to group up. Unfortunately we were far too slow to ramp up and between time zone difficulties and logistics around the holidays missed out on almost two weeks of internal prep time. This time wasn’t entirely wasted though as I used it to grind Vintage Cube trying to build up some basic familiarity with it and had some good conversations with experts about the archetype landscape and general philosophy for drafting (diverse card evals make wheel signals more important, use early picks on cheap interacts and lands if possible). Overall I did 53 drafts over 27 days with most of these being single elims against random players. Despite the soft pods I was barely winning more than I lost and after every draft had multiple picks I felt uncertain about which did not inspire confidence but I was able to gradually patch specific holes in my evals, figure out what to think about during the drafts, and memorize some heuristics for deckbuilding specifically relating to manabases which is about all I could have hoped for.

Back to Modern, my starting point had been hoping to avoid playing Energy reasoning that everyone expects it and there must be some broken option to be found after the bans. However as we played I continued to be impressed by Phlage and my post match notes often said things like “busted multi one drop hand”. We briefly considered Rhinos as a deck that beats Energy and gets to run FOV and FON but while it performed fairly well ultimately I felt that 4/4s have just gotten power crept out and lose to a lot more random things than they used to. Breach also seemed like a strong choice but it quickly became apparent to me that I would not be able to invest enough time to pilot it at high fidelity with how much effort I needed to continue putting into cube.

I spent a while tinkering with the details of the Energy list and debating the merits of RW vs Mardu. Moon doesn’t seem that good, but discard doesn’t seem that good either, but RW struggles to round out the last few slots of the deck, but Arena of Glory is a broken card, and so on. In the end I didn’t have any great insight and just went off the fact that RW is easier to play, easier to build, and has a higher winrate in all the stats we see. For tuning RW I had an experience I often do of feeling a config is random until eventually mapping and gameplay click together leaving you with a cohesive deck you feel great about.

Interlude: you’ll never say “I expect to regret this choice I am making, relative to some other choice I could make.”

In theory the context of a match should be irrelevant and one should always just be playing the best they can. Some people claim they do that but I don’t really believe them and certainly don’t live up to that ideal myself. Many details of an event influence my perception but specifically I am finding out that going below 50% expected winrate influences me a lot. This MOCS has one of the most stacked fields ever and I found it hard to cope with the idea that even if I did the best work I could I would not have an edge. In the final week before the event I cried for less than 10 seconds more than 10 times and kept thinking about the ending of Worm.

The Event: Clear desire, clear goal, clear actions, even if they are insane

I didn’t have access to more specialized soporifics so drank some Nyquil which seemed to work as I got a solid eight to nine hours of sleep. In lieu of a typical gameplay warmup I ran a single elim draft in a call with Fer and then got ready to start. I didn’t open power after getting a pack three Lurrus had a fairly straightforward draft (full log here https://magicprotools.com/draft/show?id=W4otLyctre-o4szsr-TFaxSZ_T4&deck=ahRzfmV1cGhvcmljLWRpb2RlLTYxNnIRCxIEZGVjaxiAgIDVn9OSCQw) and ended up with a premium deck.

My first match was against Mogged also playing black white and I made multiple misplays but was structurally quite favored and won in two. I then paired into Tangrams on a strong storm deck. I struggled managing leaving up my interaction from a Miscalculate vs deploying pressure and was eventually able to get there but was down to 7:11 to Tangram’s 14:35 at the end of game one and had to start playing much faster. Game two was scrappy and I believe I should have won if I was rushing less but eventually got aggroed out by Kitsa. I did succeed in narrowing the clock gap though with myself at 1:59 against 1:15 leaving me in a great spot as the storm deck should need a large amount of game actions to win. Indeed, I eventually won on time after a deeply cursed blitz game. At this point I was feeling pretty good with my final pairing being Mcwright on RG aggro which should be a good matchup for me. I lost the die roll and tanked on a seven of 4x lands with all colours, Thraben Inspector, Chromatic Star, and Reanimate. I ended up keeping which I am still not sure was right and then just never found on my answers to deal with a turn two Ursine Monstrosity. Game two was more straightforward in that I kept a two lander and missed for multiple turns to end up being barely unable to stabilize. I was somewhat disappointed but as usual didn’t have much of a problem with my mental while a tournament was ongoing so just reset for Modern.

The constructed metagame lined up exactly with what we had predicted with the exception of Kanister pivoting to Breach which was fine as my list was very well prepared for Breach. My first opponent was Terribad on Breach and I cheesed him out with Surgical on his only wincon in game one then locked him out with Blood Moon in game two and faded naturally drawn Breach for a few turns. After this I paired into Kanister on the same matchup and again stole game one with Surgical and then had a strong hand with multiple pieces of interaction against a mulligan in game two. Very straightforward games where I got lucky. Unfortunately at this point I started freaking out a bit at the magnitude of the stakes for a single match but took a fair bit of time to calm down citing some indigestion to the tournament organizers. Feeling centered again I was facing Mogged in the pseudo-mirror with me having Seasoned Pyromancers against his Fables which I expected to favor me with Pyromancer being a much better topdeck late. I won the die roll and got a Ragavan connection after removing his Ragavan at which point I was feeling good about my position. His Ajani stalled the board and on my turn I deployed a Bombardment with two Phlages in hand. When on his turn he deployed a Fable I was faced with my only decision of the game, whether to trade Ragavan for his Shaman after clearing the other creatures with Phlage. Ultimately I decided not to reasoning that the potential of a Ragavan connection and having a guaranteed target for my next Phlage was more relevant than treasure generation which I am still not sure was right and have heard mixed opinions on.

In any case my first Phlage got answered with Charm and I was eventually able to escape the second putting me in a strong position but Mogged surveiled into his own Phlage the turn before dying and had enough cards to escape his a second time after we traded while I continued drawing blanks locking up game one. Unfortunately I hard threw game two when on turn three I attacked with Phelia flickering my own Seasoned Pyromancer instead of the opponents Ajani 2/1 token and then was unable to recover as I hit a three percenter of three lands in top three cards to be unable to develop on turn four and get run over. I made the play of flickering the wrong target with Phelia very quickly and I am not entirely sure what the root cause there was between being tired, getting distracted by analyzing what my discards to Pyromancer should be, or something else entirely but this was a brutal way to end the event and I know that it will haunt me for a while.

Reflections: One taste of the old time sets all to rights

Aside from that one punt I feel solid about my play and preparation but I was talking with someone recently about how the list of leaks we have is essentially infinite. In the week before this event I spent four hours on Twitter. I misbuilt my cube deck by not including a 17th land. The list goes on and I am not sure if I have it in me to heavily engage with the MOCS circuit again but I am motivated to take heavy swings at PT Chicago and PT Vegas and am excited for that. Two points do make a line though and maybe I’ll be able to make my way back to the MOCS again for a third time. I’m also very grateful to all non-qualified parties who assisted with my prep specifically Turtle with Energy, Adri with Breach, and Julian and Troll with Cube.