PT Aetherdrift Tournament Report

2025-02-26

This weekend almost three years after my previous poor showing at the New Capenna Set Championship I got to compete in a Pro Tour again. After qualifying for this event at RC DC last year I accepted an offer to work with SystemMagic and having wrapped up my MOCS run jumped into prep for this event with a particular focus on Limited.

My weakness in limited is something I have been aware of for a long time and people I’ve spoken to have suggested a variety of approaches to such as getting coaching, watching gameplay of technically strong players, and just playing more. I’ve tried all of those and did so again before this event but did not feel that it was particularly effective. Sam Sherman did introduce me to what I believe is the actual solution inasmuch as one can exist, which is just playing Momir Basic. Momir strips away all of the fluff and quickly generates novel board states for you to practice parsing combat math on. Unfortunately I only got to play a small amount of it as it is a fairly dead format. In the end I mostly gave up on targeting long-run limited improvement before this event and settled for brute force learning things about Aetherdrift specifically, with an Anki deck for all instant speed effects, bugging the better limited player on my team about specific heuristics, and dozens of drafts and draft reviews. Going into the PT my record in house drafts was solidly negative and my winrate online was middling at best so I did not expect that I would be realizing some meaningful edge but did feel comfortable enough that I did not expect to get beat up too badly.

For constructed I had played a bit with Gruul a few months ago for a MACS qualifier and it was the deck I started out with for relearning the format. During testing I thought I was being open minded about deck choice and only locked in Gruul on 02-14 but it’s possible that I was always going to play it and would have benefitted from committing earlier and getting slightly more reps, the explore-exploit tradeoff is very hard to balance.

I did end up feeling somewhat confident that Pixie would not be a good choice between higher Baloth numbers and people teching for it on the margin across the board (such as with less Nowhere to Run and expensive non-etb This Town Ain’t Big Enough targets). We did some work on a value blink Temporary Lockdown deck and on a GW Cage variant that included Enduring Vitality but both fell somewhat short. The fact that our group was somewhat slow to ramp up combined with the already small window between set release and the event definitely made itself felt as we didn’t really focus test Oculus and Domain as much as we should have against the entire field thinking that both lost to Gruul.

For building Gruul the main ways in which our list deviated from stock was maxing Innkeeper’s Talent and playing Overprotect as extra copies of Monstrous Rage. We also decided against playing any Questing Druids in the maindeck and maxed Screaming Nemesis in large part as a product of doing some Arbitrary Goodness Unit ™ analysis. Baloth count was another topic of some debate as it’s somewhat challenging to predict how random Pixie opponents will alter their sideboarding. I ended up feeling pretty good about the branch of Gruul that we played aside from playing Torch the Witness as a consequence of overestimating Golgari metagame share and not giving enough consideration to Witchstalker Frenzy.

I flew to Minneapolis a week before the event for a testing house and then drove down on Thursday where I said hello to some people, finished assembling my paper deck, and got a solid eight to nine hours of sleep. In the morning I ate my usual oatmeal, lost a game of the mirror OTD against Marceline, and did some last minute review of 17lands data before getting into the first draft.

The draft was fairly straighforward with me getting some medium blue and white cards pack one and fully committing to those colours after a pick three or four Riptide Gearhulk in pack two. The only notable decisions I recall were taking Lifecraft Engine over some medium green cards in p1p1 and taking Transit Mage over Haunt the Network when I had one black dual in p3p1. Deck registration was a bit painful as I did not realize it is significantly faster to mark down all your cards before starting to build the deck but other than that I was extremely happy with my deck and feeling good. In round one I paired against someone who I had battled with a bunch on MTGO, BERNASTORRES. He also had a premium deck with Sab Sunen, Mu Yanling, and Afterburner Expert and I eventually lost to Mu Yanling value in a long game one where we both received judge warnings -me for not revealing a card I put into my hand with Guidelight Pathmaker and him for attempting to search his library with Skyserpent Seeker. I don’t recall much about game two so I suppose I must have just run him over and in game three I was again able to do the same after he missed fifth land for a turn delaying his Sab Sunen from coming down. In round two I played against Toru Inoue with a combat trick heavy GW deck that was medium aside from having two Veteran Beastriders. I lost game one failing to stabilize on the draw against Brightfield Glider beats but won the other two games despite not feeling like I played particularly well and specifically making a huge punt in game three blocking a saddled Venomsac Lagac with a thopter for no reason. In round three I got a straightforward win against Lorenzo Terlizzi whose medium BW deck didn’t really function while I had great draws. I was happy to trophy the pod which is not something I ever expected to happen but also knew that this was not through any virtue of mine so just wanted to try and make the best of it.

In round four I paired into Anthony Lee on the mirror where I won in two despite losing the die roll with some great hands. A judge did say I have to play faster at one point which did not bother me much as I was happy with my pacing and never went to turns during in this event but more concerningly Anthony told me after the match that I had missed a ward trigger in game one. This made me more vigilant in the next rounds but with how close many of the games were I do find myself wondering if other paper mistakes like this cost me somewhere along the way. In round five I face an opponent on Pixie who I also sat next to in round 16 and saw get scooped into the requalification. I won game one on the draw but lost the next two to all my creatures getting removed. After the match we discussed sideboarding and my opponent mentioned cutting three Hopeless Nightmares which made me question the plan of bringing them in and tentatively resolve to not do so if I observe opponents sideboarding heavily.

The following round I was sad to see that I was playing against CMack, one of the few members of our team who chose to play Domain over Gruul. I lost the die roll again and saw a very strong one-lander that I tanked on when Connor kept seven. Stefan and Daniel responding to me saying I hate mulliganing by asking me if I also hate winning and saying that I should quit the game was a transformative experience for me but in the end I couldn’t quite bring myself to mulligan which I am still not sure how to feel about. I drew the land and was in a good spot but Connor had his one maindeck Temporary Lockdown to blow me out and I quickly died from there. In game two I had Pawpatch Formation to answer a Zur and closed out the game but in game three he again had a lockdown to stymie a strong draw from me and I was only able to get him to 8 before Zur locked me out. In round seven I faced domain again and made a sizeable mistake in game one holding a Monstrous Rage when I should have cast it for damage and freed up future mana which probably cost me the game. I got game two despite again making a mistake by not realizing that my opponent naming “Beast” with Cavern meant they boarded into Obstinate Baloth which is not something I had seen before. Game three was about as close as it could possibly be, after initial trading and a Sunfall stabilizing the board neither of us had much going on and I waited a turn before using a Scorching Shot on a 3/3 Incubator token in case a better target was presented. Some turns later I could deal 24 damage against the opponent at 25 and died to 2/1 fliers on the backswing instead of going to 1 if I had killed the Incubator token sooner. Things might also have gone better if I had taken a different line involving leveling Talent at one point but it’s hard to say.

At this point going into the last round of the day I was really hoping to stymie the bleeding and close the day out with a win. It seemed like I might be in good shape to do that when I paired into Nammersquats on Mono-R and finally won the die roll the impact of which in red mirrors cannot be overstated but I mulliganed to six and couldn’t come back from Witchstalker Frenzy getting a great exchange on my buffed Manifold Mouse. I won game two after my Nemesis plus leveled Talent got to attack into an opposing Nemesis. In game three I was feeling ok when after me answering a turn one Swiftspear Nam did not develop at all on turn two and on turn three was presented with a tough decision on whether to leave my back my Nemesis to block the Nemesis he had played or try to race. I opted for the latter and the Nemeses traded in combat with both of us taking three but he followed this up with playing and activating a Hired Claw. From that point I don’t recall the exact action but my plays lined up awkwardly and I could never stabilize.

I felt awful about having choked such a good start and specifically a very lucky draft. Furthermore I was also questioning whether I even wanted to play PT Vegas at this point making the value of the AMPs I would be playing for even more unclear. I thought that I had played fine but Gruul is extremely hard to play and with no VODs to check I kept wondering if I was somehow punting horrifically. All that is to say that I did not have a good night and only got a restless 7.5 hours of sleep.

In the morning I was still feeling down but decided that not showing up for day two would be too lame and took down my negative post on Twitter reasoning that I did not want any of my potential opponents to know how I was feeling. My day two draft pod was actually fairly strong as it was composed of people with high breakers at a low record meaning they had done well in draft. I took a Thunderhead Gunner over some other mediocre options including a Kolodin p1p1 then waffled between multiple colours thinking I was primarily blue at the end of the pack. In pack two though I opened a Loot and went into that getting some decent simic cards. Pack three went even better with an opened Sab-Sunen and me getting passed a pick four or five Combustible Gearhulk to end up with a completely broken final product.

My first opponent of the day was one of my teammates in the pod Paul Yeem who had a medium UR cycling deck. In both games my Caelorna tanked ten plus damage and prevented Captain Howler from drawing cards allowing me to stall out the board and eventually take over with one of my bombs. Concerned about having misbuilt the mana I asked Bullwinkle and Gul_Dukat for input but they seemed to think what I had was reasonable. Round ten saw me facing the other teammate in my pod, Daniel Weiser. His match had gone quite long in the previous round so I suspected that he was also playing something soupy which was indeed the case his own Sab-Sunen, Possession Engine, and multiple Voyage Homes. Game one dragged on for a while but I found my god before he did and also applying pressure in the air with Skystreak Engineers while the ground was stalled to eventually get there. Game two went much faster as I ramped into my gearhulk with Skyserpent to get a huge hit in and then bounced it to close out the game the following turn. At this point I felt somewhat reinvigorated hoping that another very premium draft deck could help me back to a respectable record. Sadly I lost round eleven to a solid GB reanimator deck where in both postboard games I kept solid land light hands and never found my lands.

Things then continued trending downwards when in round twelve I again lost the die roll to pixie and gave my only two game loss of the tournament with my opponent playing five or six Optimistic Scavengers and me just having no moves. I used the long break I would have between rounds here to go down to the water and try to reset. The location of the event hall is quite scenic and I wish I had taken advantage of the opportunities offered by that more on day one.

The next round I paired into Julien Henry on the mirror who I knew from having worked together for an RC at one point in the past. He won the die roll in game one and ran me over, I did the same in game two, but in game three he mulled to six and had a medium hand with four or five creatures but no way to accrue value with them that got fully stonewalled by my Screaming Nemesis and eventually I took over the game. In round fourteen I faced an opponent on GW Cage that I had seen playing against one of my teammates in an earlier round and felt a bit foolish for not having tried to get information on what those games looked like though there was really no way I could have effectively done so. I’m not sure who won the die roll but the fact that I don’t remember suggests that it was me and I won a game one where the opponent didn’t have much going on and didn’t get to flip Collector’s Cage. In game two I again kept a one-lander this one more suspect than the previous with two of the spells being Torch the Towers. I missed for a few turns and eventually died to two impended Overlords backed up by two Restless Prairies. Game three was not that competitive and really the only card my opponent could have had that would have mattered was the one of Split Up which I was lucky to fade to get the win.

In round fifteen I saw I was playing against Seth Manfield on Domain. I won the die roll and had a great hand to kill through Zur and an animated creature blocking. Postboard the game dragged on for a while with him stabilizing with a Beza, me killing it with Scorching Shot to continue applying some pressure, and him getting down a Zur. After Zur had been gaining life for multiple turns we got to a boardstate where I was at two with a sizeable board and he had a Zur to block my biggest creature meaning that I needed to find a source of trample or removal before I would die the next turn. Fortunately a Rockface Village activation on my Emberheart Challenger flipped Pawpatch Formation and I was able to edge out the win.

Going into the final round I was feeling pretty good but uncertain on what I was playing for. If my opponent had asked for a concession I am not sure what I would have done. However my opponent did not speak much English and did not react with recognition when I asked if they cared about the win so we were just going to play. I was again facing Domain but thought the specific list was even worse in this matchup than normal due to zero Lockdowns in the 75. I lost the die roll but the opponent never really did anything with the most notable element of the game being a protracted judge call about the fact that the opponent had themselves at three less life than I did after missing gaining life from Herd Migration. Postboard the game was slower with an Authority of the Consuls but I was able to safely develop with multiple Innkeeper’s Talents and opponent didn’t draw a Zur.

This brought me to a 10-6 record to finish in 47th place and earn an additional invite for Vegas #shrinkthegame. Objectively this is a decent result at the PT level but I have mixed feelings about it since it came almost entirely from two blessed draft seats. My preparation also had a number of issues and I am not sure that I did anything right above the floor on what talking with other reasonable people gets you. As I touched on earlier in this post already I was also left very unsure about whether I want to play PT Vegas and what my engagement with the game should look like moving forward. Burning a PT invite sounds unhinged but at the same time I don’t think I can bring myself to give preparation less than a wholehearted effort and don’t feel great about doing infinite work to be a 50/50 player. The group I worked with not existing for the next event is another complicating factor. In any case, I look forward to taking a break after a hectic few months between this and the MOCS and reevaluating my engagement with the game. Credit to all of team SystemMagic, Tristan for the outside counsel, and Daniel for the cross-team Gruul discussion.