2022 Review/2023 Goals

Coming into 2022, I wasn't sure what my relationship with Magic would look like on any front. My part of the world was opening up again but large Magic tournaments still seemed like a thing of the past. The online OP offerings focused on Arena, an awful environment for competitive play in many ways, and the dream of professional Magic had been officially put down by WotC in 2021. The first big upheaval wasn't even on my radar yet...

CONTENT

Back in February, most of my colleagues were let go by StarCityGames in the most dramatic example of the struggles facing the ecosystem of written Magic content. Instead of belonging to a team that featured writers and players I'd looked up to for a decade or more I was now the sole reminder that competitive Magic existed, showing up once a week to make sure the lighthouse was still visible.

I'd be lying if I said my writing didn't suffer as a result. In one sense I had more choice over what to write about than ever - I no longer had to fight for the right to cover the obvious hit from the latest batch of previews or the breakout Modern deck of the week - but I lacked the motivation of keeping up with the standard set by my peers (and wanting that label to be accurate). I knew I wasn't the main draw to SCG for most readers but I wanted the people who were there for Gerry or Paulo etc and checked my column to like what they saw and come back for more. 

I've generally been good at finding satisfaction in doing boring/basic tasks properly but this wasn't automatically true here even though (or maybe because?) it was a task I had once enjoyed in the thing I'm most passionate about. My goal here is to shore up that internal motivation in the absence of an external one and make sure that even the 'generic' columns end up as good versions of themselves.

As a reaction to this earthquake I took a look at the opaque and perverse incentives behind Magic content and the reasons Magic coverage often fails to live up to its potential over at MTG Grindcast. 

On my own time, Ari and I rebooted Dominaria's Judgment and broadened its scope to competitive/Constructed Magic with the focus still on Modern. I think we have established a good niche as the best podcast for people looking for consistent, detailed Modern analysis and I want to build on that in 2023. It's disturbing how many compliments we get from people who say they miss the podcast and weren't aware it's back on a new feed but hopefully they enjoy the backlog - marketing more aggressively should be a goal for this year.

Beyond that, the episodes that stand out to me from the podcast's run are our interview with newly minted World Champion Nathan Steuer and our looks back at the first Modern Pro Tours (my oral history of PT Philly is the single piece of content I'm most proud of). There are a lot of interviews with Magic personalities but I think many of them are unclear about their objectives and/or poor at accomplishing them so there's still room for something more focused. There's also very little historical Magic content at a time when the game's competitive history is being ignored or actively erased by its creators. The audience for this stuff tends to really enjoy it and it's what I most enjoy making so this year I'm going to just do it - I haven't figured out specifics but that can come later. 

More generally, a goal for 2023 is to make more of what I want to see. There's no shame in doing the Top X power rankings listicles (as long as you're actually good at it!) but I want to embrace the obscure stuff. I already post my assorted thoughts about Cube but I want to do that in a more structured way. I want this blog to be a showcase for this cool Premodern deck or this weird Magic thought experiment - it will be a failure if this is the most recent post here three months from now. 

Like everyone else I've wondered about streaming but my usual MTGO setup hasn't supported that until recently. I doubt I could or would want to be a 'streamer' per se but I want to be able to stream some testing or some silly experimental decks from time to time - maybe some VOD reviews too for the sake of intentional practice. 

I've also greatly enjoyed getting to do more coaching and commentary this year and I frankly think I'm better than most of the competition at both. If you want me for either, hit me up! 

COMPETITION

2022 was a confusingly successful year for me in competitive Magic - a good problem to have but something I need to unpack. As always, it felt like my success was unmoored from my preparation in a way that made me oddly optimistic - if this was me winging it, think how good I could be if I actually applied myself!

https://twitter.com/dominharvia/status/1477847477738950659

I began the year on a high by winning a Pioneer PTQ on Magic Online with Jeskai Ascendancy Combo. It was a few months before the return of paper Organized Play would put the spotlight back on Pioneer and the format was solved or unexplored depending on who you asked. Ascendancy was a boomer-zoomer breakout collaboration a few months prior as the best Omnath deck but by now Omnath had become unimpressive as a card that made their removal relevant (and would rarely win the game even if uncontested) and encouraged you to play underwhelming Growth Spirals and mangle your manabase with Fabled Passage. 

The recent printing of Consider made it possible to do something I wanted to do anyway: streamline the deck by severing these weak links and embracing the combo with the full four copies of Sylvan Awakening. With this change in approach, the tournament felt easy. I had the best list of perhaps the best deck - what more could I ask for?

Well, a functional manabase for a start - this disaster was the result of very hasty, late maths trying to balance the need for untapped blue early with Mountains for Chained to the Rocks and the demands of Iteration/Ascendancy. If I had thought about this deck any earlier, I could have spent some much-needed time solving that puzzle. The sideboard was also shoddy given what I knew about the metagame and the popular SB configurations for the opposing Phoenix lists at the time. With just a little preparation, I could have had a much cleaner list to show off my breakthrough. 

In one sense, you want to be able to arrive at these conclusions without doing the work (there's an obvious analogy here with in-game decision making, where AFAICT most top players base it on intuition to a degree that's surprising at first but one goal of practice is to hone that intuition such that you can rely on it enough of the time). My experience playing every combo deck under the sun in 2006 Extended was probably more useful for deciding what this deck should look like than any more focused practice since then. If you are crunched for time during tournament preparation (as you inevitably were for the GP/SCG grinds if you had any other commitments or for these weeks of Super Qualifiers where every day is a different format), you need to be able to draw on that past experience and quickly glean useful information from the little testing you can do. I didn't need to do a lot of testing, I just needed to put that small sliver of work in early enough to reap the rewards - that's still a regret even when I look at the scoreboard. 

https://twitter.com/dominharvia/status/1490498638312873984

A month later I won a Vintage PTQ for the following Set Championships. I chronicled my strange introduction to the format on this blog last year and racked up more results here sticking to my faithful Esper Tinker. That was notable because it's a rare instance of me adopting and sticking with the consensus 'best deck' and it's easy to wonder if I should just apply that same template elsewhere - I'd be a better Magic player if I played Steam Vents/Volcanic Island in every format for a month. It was easy here because that deck fit my preferred playstyle and I would have ended up there anyway - my early forays into those URx T*mpo decks in other formats didn't go well and I wasn't motivated to put the work in to change that. Being drawn to the flexible combo-control deck is a good problem to have since those decks come around reasonably often and tend to be very strong but I didn't even capitalize on those opportunities - I could have spent the early pandemic days playing a lot more Inverter and Reclamation than I did. 

https://twitter.com/puntthenwhine/status/1350521095280062474

In non-rotating formats without a broken deck it makes sense to stay at your local maximum, especially in the short term. If I have a Modern tournament this weekend, do I try and play stock Murktide at a 7/10 clip or just play Amulet again? This year was a carousel of weekends where I just played Amulet followed by a period where I legitimately tried to explore other options... before just playing Amulet. The infamous Tier 0/1 copypasta actually has an important truth within it - if it wasn't correct for me to default to 'my deck' on a given weekend it was because there was a deck so clearly above the pack that I should be playing that instead or because conditions were unusually hostile to Amulet (suggesting that it's worth expanding your range to include one or more decks that are good under those circumstances - right now I'd want a backup Modern deck that is good against BR Scam and Murktide as well as Blood Moon effects in general).  

https://twitter.com/dominharvia/status/1594089495376396288

https://twitter.com/dominharvia/status/1604622366860091394

The end of 2022 offered a perfect example of this. I entered the monthly ManaTraders tournament for November with Amulet after failing to click with any other deck and sailed through to the finals, qualifying me for their end of year Invitational which would force me to play Pioneer and Legacy. Legacy had devolved into a Delver vs Initiative shitshow and was only 3 rounds of the tournament so it didn't make sense to focus much on it but Pioneer presented its own puzzle. 

In preparation for the Regional Championship I tried a lot of decks and was still left with a long list of promising options I never got to. I viewed that tournament as a freeroll of sorts since I was qualified for the Pro Tour it fed (...kinda) so eventually I went with my heart over my head and registered the Enigmatic Incarnation deck that is one of my favourite decks in all of Magic at this point. After losing my win-and-in for Top 8, I was impressed enough by the deck's power to keep it as a default.

Going into the ManaTraders Invi, I ended up writing off one format and defaulting to my favourite decks in the other two - all the while kicking myself for not preparing for this high-stakes event in a more careful way. I then won the tournament, going 7-0 in Pioneer and performing at a level with Amulet that I couldn't reach with any other deck on such short notice. Once again, the scoreboard became a monument to imposter syndrome. If I had bombed out of the tournament, I still wouldn't know what I should have played instead or exactly what process would have let to that conclusion.

Maybe I have my answer already? My process is haphazard and certainly looks flawed from the inside but seems to work for me - maybe this is the local maximum I'm meant to stay at? There's no shortage of players who 'do their own thing' and do it well, and the fact that can happen is what keeps Magic charming and engaging. This offers another set of options - double down on my process and make it the best version of itself, or assume that I've explored this process as much as I can so I may as well try something more conventional even if it's unlikely to stick.

COLLABORATION

This becomes a different problem when it's not just about me. Helping others prepare for tournaments that I have no stake in myself (beyond seeing them succeed) has been one of my favourite ways to engage with competitive Magic since COVID - I get to focus on a specific goal with the satisfaction of helping others but without the implied pressure on myself or the difficulty in balancing my interests with theirs. My role is whatever most useful to them - playing [stock list of Tier 1 deck] until my eyes bleed or coming up with offbeat ideas as they see fit. 

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The real issue comes when you're both working as part of a larger unit and have your own interests in mind. Winning these PTQs gave me two Set Championship invites and I was very glad to join Team Handshake for both - one of the most successful teams in the Arena era (with a historically dominant performance by non-me members of the team at the New Capenna Championship). Getting to test with someone like PVDDR was a bucket list item for me as a younger competitive player and this was my first chance to get an inside look at how an elite team operates. 

My biggest takeaway was that Pro Tour preparation is really hard to optimize. That shouldn't be a surprise - if it was easy it wouldn't be interesting and the former superteams would have done it already. Alchemy at the Neon Dynasty Championship was a newish format with less public information than any in recent memory (one PTQ, won by Naya Runes, ended up shaping the entire discourse for the event) and the community collectively missed Fable of the Mirror-Breaker in what Paulo correctly (and sadly retrospectively!) called the biggest miss in card evaluation in years. In an era where every card does everything and some older heuristics don't apply, actually playing with the cards to cut through that fog is more important than ever. 

(The New Capenna Championship was a big miss for me personally. Our team was excited about the Dragonstorm deck that mad genius cftsoc had introduced to the world and it was performing well for us but it was public information and I assumed players at the PT level would actually respect it. We had excellent midrange minds like Allen Wu working on our Esper list and it wasn't a bad choice - Zach Kiihne and Simon Nielsen both took it to the Top 8 - but it was definitely wrong for me. I had the chance to play a potentially busted deck that absolutely fits my preferences and playstyle and I played the mopey mid deck instead. Never again!) 

It was also a good study in group dynamics. One or two vocal people who are trusted by the group can have a disproportionate influence over the process even if they aren't in an official leadership role. If a team does try to have a more formal structure, that brings its own questions - what do you want in a leader, and how much authority do they actually have over the process? How do you handle disagreements over assigned roles? As a new member to a group, it's tough to know how much to assert yourself when you don't have a full grasp of the group or its process yet. I tried to fill gaps where I could and test whatever matchups other people had in mind etc but I'm not sure how well I did that ultimately. Over time you can find a role that works for you but with the current paper Pro Tour system it's unlikely that a large team can remain intact over the course of the season so there will be more churn in members and less time for those relationships to develop. 

TIME MANAGEMENT

Despite my schedule allowing a lot of time for Magic, I don't spend a much time playing (and even less of that is thoughtful practice). My attempts to strike a better balance between Magic and other commitments mostly resulted in me feeling guilty when I tried to focus on Magic and distracted by Magic when I tried to focus on other things. 

My goal for this year is to plan my time better and draw sharper lines. I should spend as much time as is appropriate on Magic and feel no shame in doing that; I should pursue other interests in a more focused way. Magic is a big enough part of my life that achieving a healthy balance overall will involve finding a suitable place for Magic and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Part of the problem is that a lot of the Magic I do play is just for the sake of it - there's a Prelim coming up and I'm not busy, may as well hop in - or, worse, it's a response to tilt from other tournaments going poorly. It's easy to play a Challenge on the weekend, flop, and try to seek redemption in a format that I enjoy less and am less prepared for - at that point, why should I expect anything different?

The MOCS Showcases stand out here. I end up playing a bunch of them for 'free' at the end of a season because I have expiring QPs but without putting any real work into them, squandering a good opportunity for serious practice and competition in a format (as well as further opportunities if I happen to Top 8). I want to be more mindful of the Showcases this year.

The other side of that is making an effort to have special tournament experiences. I was sceptical of CubeCon when it was announced but the reviews were very positive and I'm determined to attend this year. I've dabbled in Premodern on and off and I want to dabble properly at LobsterCon. I won't be playing for a PT invite at the Vancouver RC and who knows how good the format will be but the chance to visit Vancouver with friends sounds great. I want to make more of those tournament memories that are still vivid years from now. 

PRO TOUR 

The big event looming over the year for me is the Pro Tour. Going 9-6 in the New Capenna Championship gave me an invite to the first Pro Tour, which I was able to defer thanks to a wedding that weekend. By the time I get to use my invite in May it will be a full year since I earned it and during that time I've been musing about how to prepare properly when the time comes. 

Some of that ties into above topics like teamwork etc. but the big hurdle for me will be Limited. I'll gladly draft if it's convenient but don't seek it out and I've always been much more focused on Constructed. In one sense the average level of Limited play will be lower here than at any pre-pandemic PT (most of the old Limited experts aren't around and many recent up-and-comers haven't had to draft under PT conditions yet) but/and there's also more Limited data and content than ever before if you know how to use it. I like to think I can keep up with the median PT competitor in Limited and there are some clear steps I can take:

- Get used to watching useful Limited streams and content now (Lords of Limited, Limited Level-Ups, Drafting Archetypes/Sam Black's stream, Kyle Rose/The Ham is my initial roster) so that it's a habit by the time I actually have to do it 

- Similarly, start drafting retail Limited sets so I can practice applying whatever lessons I learn here 

- Focus my practice on combat planning, using/playing around tricks etc since this is something that isn't intuitive to me and doesn't draw on Constructed skills for the most part

- Get Limited coaching to identify and patch up these holes in my game 

- Try to get in a reasonable volume of paper drafts with good players (if not an actual draft camp) under PT conditions once the set is released 

- Front-load my Constructed preparation as much as I can so I can really focus on Limited properly

I expect my review of 2023 will be largely dependent on my process/results for the Pro Tour but I'm optimistic that I can give myself a good shot there.