unfiltered thoughts from PT Cleveland - the good, the bad, and the ugly

The Good

I top 8ed a PT. That's cool!





I got $10,000 for it. That is the most money I've ever won at anything at once. Second place is currently held by the $8000 in free slot play I won from a drawing at the casino last year, which I converted to about $6000 in cash. My previous best finish in a Magic premier event, a second place finish at Grand Prix Charlotte in 2005, awarded me $1700. I cashed four PTs prior to this one, and my combined winnings from those total about $4000.

I also get an invite to the next PT in London, which I didn't already have. I was thinking about going to London for the prerelease GP anyway. Side note, I'm very excited about low-to-no prep PT formats, especially limited ones. I always felt like I generally perform better at the beginning of formats, where it's more reliant on natural skill and intuition, rather than the end of formats, where everyone has had a chance to catch up with practice. My ability to practice and test was never that good, and my learning rate seems to be generally worse than that of most other competitive players, even at the GP/PTQ level.

My career stats are a little less anemic now. This is a modern-era PT top 8, which I believe are harder than PTs from when I started playing them in 2006, and definitely harder than the ones before then. So, going by my own personal Hall of Fame voting criteria, this top 8 carries a decent amount of weight.

I feel a little bit of relief in terms of where I am in the landscape of competitive Magic. I always felt like I existed in this space where a lot of aspiring competitive players looked up to me, for reasons that I was never quite sure of - it didn't really feel like I was doing much winning in the tournaments they wanted to win in. And then you have the upper echelon of the game, the people who I wanted to consider as competitive equals, and yet they were so far ahead of me results wise that it's hard not to feel like they were just plain better than me in every imaginable aspect, like I still had dozens of layers of strategy to uncover before I could start meaningfully competing with them. I understand that you are more than just your Magic results and whatever the other running sentiments of toxic positivity Magic twitter are, but being able to convert my innate understanding of the game to a super tangible result after a decade of trying is definitely validating.

I also love Magic Arena. It makes it soooo easy to play a lot of satisfying, meaningful games of Standard. I definitely would not have done as well as I did without it. I also got to see first hand the results of just more raw practice - it felt way easier and less stressful to pivot between decks in the weeks leading up to the event. My understanding of the constructed format was more complete than it ever has been before.

The Bad

I didn't think the red deck I played was that bad. I thought it was pretty good actually. Still, it's getting absolutely NO attention whatsoever in the post-mortem - nobody is really writing about it unless they're going out of their way to say it's bad, nobody's mentioning it as a consideration for a deck they might play, or even to prepare for. That stings and kind of makes me feel like I just got really lucky to top 8.

I also had exactly one feature match in the entire event prior to the top 8. I always kind of felt like coverage was deliberately ignoring me - almost like I had been shadow-banned from it for some reason, like I had unknowingly insulted someone on coverage many years ago or something. This is maybe another thing that's all in my head, since I've never been big on personal branding and I don't really go out of my way to seek attention, but at the same time, I definitely feel like I get snubbed by coverage sometimes - at GP Hartford last year, I gave Frank Skarren the decklist that he used to top 8, and he wrote me a nice shoutout in his top 8 profile, which they ended up deleting. For some reason, in that same top 8, Max McVety wrote a shoutout in his profile and they let his through. What gives, why cut me out?

I went back to watch the tapes of my games. I already roughly knew about two really bad mistakes I made - one vs. Huey in round 13 where I forgot my Steam-Kin had a damage on it and made mana with it only to have it immediately die, and one vs. Reid where I sculpted a sequence that involved hitting a land off Light Up the Stage when I had already played one for the turn. I spotted yet another one, in game 2 I think, where I had Firebrand + two Lightning Strikes to try and kill a Djinn and I let Reid untap and draw for some reason, giving him more mana and another card to try and stop it. I really have to wonder if I'd have won that game if I just took the Djinn out - I'd have had so much more time to draw into something.

I don't really feel any better at Magic than I was a month ago, or a year ago. I have no idea where this result came from, or why it decided to show up now.

On top of that, I'm still riddled with anxiety. Making those mistakes on camera doesn't help. You'd think that top 8ing a PT would help me feel like people generally see me as a good player, but I still can't shake the feeling that people see me and think "he's still pretty bad, everyone just gets lucky once in a while."

The Ugly

I pretty much didn't play Magic in Q3 and Q4 of 2018. I skipped PT Guilds to save my Silver invite for this tournament, and because of the nerf to Silver, I reasoned that I didn't have any particular need to chase pro points, so I skipped a ton of GPs that I'd have otherwise gone to.

I'd have gone to Providence, New Jersey Standard, and Atlanta for sure, and I'd have considered Detroit, Memphis, and Portland. You could argue that increasing my focus on the PT by removing the distractions of having to travel so frequently for GPs was a significant contributor to my success, but I'm not quite sold on that just yet.

Because I skipped so many events, I find myself in need of 11 more pro points (in addition to the 3 I'm guaranteed from London) to make Gold and play in all the PTs this year before pro points disappear forever. That's a tall order - I pretty much need to bink a 2 in every event I plan on playing before the end of June, or preferably get a reasonable finish in PT London, probably both.

Barring that, I have to hope that these 32 fancy Mythic Points I'm sitting on will be good for another PT invite of some sort, or else I'll end up like Josh Cho in 2012. (Josh top 8ed PT Avacyn Restored in Barcelona, which was the last PT of that season, and got 20 something pro points and an invite to the next PT, the first PT of the next season. Those 20 points were good for Silver, but Silver didn't do anything back then, so he pretty much just top 8ed a PT and got one invite for the next one, which didn't go as well - and just like that he was off the PT again. They changed the rule for Silver shortly afterwards to have it give a flexible invite to a PT, which is why I liked to refer to Silver invites as "Josh Cho Memorial Invites.")

It just really sucks to exist for a very long time on the edges of a system that has always rewarded spikes way more than it rewarded consistent-but-not-top8 finishes at GPs, convinced that I'll never spike and that it's slowly becoming less and less worth it to chase it as both the system and my life outside of Magic constantly change, only to unexpectedly spike big time and STILL be unable to leverage it into some more guaranteed time on the PT. It makes me feel like competitive Magic will just always be a brutal and financially unfeasible uphill climb no matter what level you're at.

I spent my entire career just scrapping to qualify and I always wondered where I could take my game if I didn't have to constantly worry about scraping up enough points for silver, playing inconveniently-timed prelims on modo to try and qualify for limited PTQs, and just generally stressing nonstop about where my next PT invite is going to come from. Thanks to the Silver nerf last year, if I want to keep finding ways to play in PTs besides spiking qualifiers (which I'd have to do anyway), I have to go back to the grind - I don't really have any time to bask in the warmth of my accomplishment. I ended up skipping GP LA after briefly entertaining the idea of going, and I already feel like I'm behind.

Also, in my opinion, the state of Magic content is dismal. I wrote an article about my T8 and the red deck and was basically directly instructed to keep my thoughts and stories to a minimum and to only write about the deck and why I played it, a sideboard guide, and what changes I'd make to the deck going forward. That's not what I wanted to write at all, but I did it anyway because I'm a sellout.

I like to write about Magic, but I never wanted to write anything unless I felt like I had something meaningful to contribute, and I definitely didn't thinK I was capable of doing that on any kind of regular schedule. I also feel like churning out endless deck and sideboard guides is generally very boring and also dodges the issue of actually improving your Magic fundamentals, in exchange for a quick fix about how to play your deck of choice for your next tournament. Maybe I'm out of touch and that's all people want. Maybe that's all they have time for.

When I started playing competitive Magic, content was so scarce that I devoured every article I could find. I could read it all and still have plenty of time to discover the game by myself / with my play group. It was a step up from the days where there was almost no content whatsoever, when I was getting paper copies of The Sideboard magazine and desperately scouring for premier event top 8 decklists, and I was mostly on my own. Nowadays, I feel like there is too much content. I feel like people are too eager to create and monetize their magic content, only because it's one of the most reliable ways to be involved with this game and earn money, and not because of a burning desire to advance our collective understanding of the game. I always wanted my contributions to be more academic, more timeless, referenced by up and coming Magic players for years. None of the articles I read these days are like that, and having just sent off an article, I understand why - the content machines mandate that their articles be in a very specific format because that's unfortunately what the people are interested in.

You could argue that this is a good thing, that it creates jobs and income for people that want to supply this content while simultaneously satisfying a huge demand for it. I'm open to that interpretation. It's just going to take some time to reframe the role of magic content to my personal journey - it's not going to be groundbreaking like it was in the early 2000s. I feel like we've come full circle - there wasn't much content in the early days and I was mostly on my own, and now there is so much content that it's not worth my time to consume it all and sift through it to find the worthwhile bits, and I'm mostly on my own again.  I'm not sure how much of it is a function of my particular circumstances as a longtime competitive player that's already seen many things, and how much of it is the big-name content machines cutting out interesting and potentially groundbreaking content in favor of what drives clicks.


I have a couple other thoughts about a couple other topics, including but not limited to:

my current impression of how to succeed at Magic
my current impression of the PT landscape in the advent of streaming and the MPL
some misc thoughts about booster draft

but that's enough for now. If you catch me at the right time, I'd probably be down for a 1-on-1 conversation about any of this.