Pro Tour Dominaria Report

This Pro Tour was special. It was the first Pro Tour in many years that did not occur just after the set it was named for. By comparison, PT Dominaria happened a fair bit after the release of the new set Dominaria. Therefore, players had a lot more time developing and defining a post-Dominaria Standard metagame, while also having a lot of time and feedback for assessing the new Limited environment.

To put it bluntly, I didn't like this change. I would say a lot of my advantage in Magic comes from learning card interactions quickly. It definitely helps to have played a lot of Limited formats in order to draw conclusions that others might need a few more drafts or even weeks to find. Giving people more time to catch up is a downside for me. Also, since our team was filled with excellent Standard players, having a solved metagame is not ideal.

Everybody knew that R/B Midrange is a great deck and if you want to beat it, chances are you'll fall short against all the other decks in the format. At this point, it is fairly unlikely that you'll find a new, undiscovered deck capable of crushing the tournament and, again, it is more about getting a few percentage points rather than a major advantage.

Unfortunately, this also leads to a higher chance of a polarized metagame. When players know the best deck, a lot of people will choose that deck, as it's the safest choice, leading to a top 8 that was one of the least interesting in a while. The games were certainly challenging (proven by the fact that multiple games were lost on a single decision), but the prevalence of two or three different archetypes in the top 8 is certainly not what people like to see.

Preparation

With so many tournaments ahead of the Pro Tour, testing Standard was not high on my priority list. Early on, I wanted to get a good feeling for Limited, since there was a team GP on the weekend Dominaria released. Also, learning Limited early is more fun and gives me more time to play Standard later.

Limited

Unfortunately learning Dominaria was not that hard. Everybody realized very early that aggro-decks are hard to draft and it comes down to value a lot of the times. Usually, the most important task in a draft was not really rating the cards themselves, but finding out which color was open. Since almost all color combinations are playable, finding the open combination is much more crucial than having some advanced insight on specific cards. Not that it doesn't help, it's just not as impactful.

Everybody knows that green-black Saprolings is a very good deck, but I personally think that blue-red wizards is far, far superior. People do know that it is or can be powerful, but I feel like this specific archetype was underdrafted for its power level. It also felt like a deck where the wheeling cards were the most accurate to predict.  and in the first few packs had a good chance of coming back and those cards are decent playables that other decks don't want. In our team-Limited statistics UR-wizards had a stunning 100% winrate in the beginning, which is mainly because it was drafted only once. Once! In about 60 Drafts. In relation to that, GB-saproling was drafted 8 times. It seems that people knew the deck was powerful, but on the other side didn't jump into that specific archetype early enough. A true wizards deck needs a critical number of wizards for and . With that in mind, there aren't many good wizards to choose from. Ideally, you don't want to play Ghitu Chronicler on turn two, unless you really have to, so there is only Ghitu Lavarunner left and I feel like people didn't want to put the effort for making this card work. While this is not a major (forceable) advantage, it is something. After all, the deck is very capable of winning with its commons and that is something very important to realize.

My main goal was to get at least 4-2 record in the draft portion, which is a little bit higher than my PT/GP-Draft average.

The first draft was exactly what I was hoping for. It was very obvious, that wizards were open and while pack three was very empty, the first two boosters where enough to carry me to a 3-0 draft. The second draft was not as soft. I did figure out the right colors, but I had to pass decent blue and white cards to my right, so my second booster was very weak. My deck did feature two [In Bolas Clutches], but I lost to the better UW-deck to my left and the double deck to my right, a card which lines up nicely against control magic (because you take control of it tapped and, once it dies, your opponent gets to remove the counters and eventually recast it again - sad times).

Standard

Standard was a different ball game. I was heavily relying on the tournament results from GP Birmingham and the Standard gurus of my testing team to guide me.

I was playing a bad W/U Control list in Birmingham, which was not good enough for a decent record, since was usually: 6 mana - lose the game to . After that I tested W/U a lot, but could not get it to the right place. All the answers in white are slow and somewhat specific. People familiar with the deck weren't attacking with all their creatures into or actually did attack with all the creatures if they needed to. It was a fine deck but playing this meant I have to be prepared to play some intense mirrors, against well-tuned decks and I felt I didn't have the edge there. I did not think it was the best deck.

While the rest of our team were testing some real decks, I was trying out some fringe strategies, just in case they might be the jackpot. I have tried , Mono Blue , Mono B and BR [Eldest Reborn], but none of them were outstanding, let alone on par.

While I was trying/failing with those, our Standard masterminds were testing Grixis Control and Mono Red and got both decks in a quite reasonable place. We knew a lot of people will play RB-variants and Mono Red is slightly ahead against those. In the end, 8 out of 10 people decided to play the Mono Red list, also because you can't really go wrong with a streamlined aggro deck. If some team broke the metagame, you are more likely to steal games with this than a slower deck because the power of fast creatures and decent reach in form of burn and is hard to come by.

This is the list we ended up playing:

Wrap-Up

All eight of us made day two with this deck. While I finished 82th place with 10-6 (getting me 3 points shy of gold), Christian Hauck finished 29th for a decent amount of money and pro points and Arne Huschenbeth locked gold.

I still think this deck is fine and there is a high chance that I'll be running this again in Copenhagen. Going on after the PT, I would add another for a and maybe even a fourth one. There is no way, that RB/Mono Red aren't the most played decks with about 30-35% of the field.

I hope you liked the insight into my pro tour preparation. I would like to hear your opinion on Standard right now and how you perceived the coverage of PT Dominaria. Did you like the adjusted timing of the Pro Tour was a bit later or do you feel there was a lack of innovation at the event.

Thanks for reading,

Toffel

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily Cardmarket.