Alex and I arrived in Barcelona on Thursday a week before the event and would be staying at an apartment with the Italians that would eventually become home base for all our testing with them, as well as USA and Brazil. Most players arrived over the weekend but Alex wanted to get there early to fight off any jet lag so we were there a few days before anyone else arrived.
We talked Team Sealed a bit and did some mock pools on his laptop but we didn’t get to play any actual games until other people arrived as we did not have many cards between the two of us so we were mostly trying to theory craft a third deck since that was giving our group a lot of trouble.

Unified Standard put a lot of constraints on deckbuilding mainly due to almost every deck using upwards of twelve fetch lands so some concessions were going to have to be made for at least one deck in terms of mana bases.

Seat B: Atarka Red – Justin Richardson

[deck]
[Lands]
4 Bloodstained Mire
3 Cinder Glade
1 Forest
9 Mountain
4 Wooded Foothills
[/Lands]
[Spells]
4 Atarka’s Command
3 Become Immense
4 Dragon Fodder
3 Hordeling Outburst
3 Temur Battle Rage
4 Titan’s Strength
4 Wild Slash
[/Spells]
[Creatures]
4 Abbot of Keral Keep
2 Lightning Berserker
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Zurgo Bellstriker
[/Creatures]
[Sideboard]
2 Arc Lightning
1 Boiling Earth
4 Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh
1 Hordeling Outburst
2 Lightning Berserker
2 Rending Volley
3 Roast
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

Our starting point was Atarka Red as it was the consensus best deck in our group for the format as it was the most powerful deck, did not share cards with anything else and it could afford to give up the two [card]Windswept Heath[/card]s (arguably the worst cards in the deck) without it being too detrimental and just adding the third [card]Cinder Glade[/card]. We probably put the least amount of time into Atarka Red as the list was already pretty optimized and you don’t want to add anything too clunky or fancy to the main deck as it would take away the main strengths of the deck in being very streamlined.

We tried a lot of different sideboard options like [card]Den Protector[/card], [card]Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh[/card], [card]Outpost Siege[/card], [card]Hooting Mandrills[/card] and [card]Thunderbreak Regent[/card]s with [card]Draconic Roar[/card]s. The best performing cards were [card]Den Protector[/card] and Chandra while the other cards proved to be too slow or too low impact. Out of those two we went with maxing out on Chandra because we were pretty certain one of our other decks were going to be playing [card]Den Protector[/card]s as we were leaning towards Abzan at the time. Chandra was good because it was a must answer threat and it was great against cards like [card]Surge of Righteousness[/card] and [card]Arashin Cleric[/card] that a lot of decks would be bringing in against you.

The second deck we decided on was Esper Dragons. We worked on a few different Jace decks, mostly Mage-Ring Esper and Blue Black Control. We even had a [card]Dark Petition[/card] control deck going around for a while with some silver bullet tutor targets like [card]Virulent Plague[/card] and [card]Infinite Obliteration[/card] but it felt worse in almost every matchup. We discussed Four Colour Rally but decided that taking [card]Windswept Heath[/card] from the third deck would limit us too much and make the deck a lot weaker whatever it ended up being.

One of the strengths of Esper Dragons was the power of [card]Dragonlord Ojutai[/card] and that it was actually just the best way to win against bad matchups since it provided the fastest clock in a control deck.

Seat A: Esper Dragons – Alexander Hayne

[deck]
[Lands]
4 Flooded Strand
1 Haven of the Spirit Dragon
6 Island
4 Polluted Delta
3 Prairie Stream
3 Shambling Vent
3 Sunken Hollow
2 Swamp
[/Lands]
[Spells]
1 Complete Disregard
1 Crux of Fate
4 Dig Through Time
4 Duress
3 Foul-Tongue Invocation
1 Languish
1 Painful Truths
4 Silumgar’s Scorn
3 Ultimate Price
2 Utter End
[/Spells]
[Creatures]
4 Dragonlord Ojutai
2 Dragonlord Silumgar
4 Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy
[/Creatures]
[Sideboard]
1 Painful Truths
1 Ultimate Price
4 Arashin Cleric
3 Monastery Mentor
1 Tasigur, the Golden Fang
1 Dispel
1 Infinite Obliteration
1 Negate
1 Surge of Righteousness
1 Virulent Plague
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

Our list wasn’t that special but the day before the event Alex and Tom Martell were testing the deck and found how powerful [card]Monastery Mentor[/card] and [card]Painful Truths[/card] were so that became a key sideboard strategy in a lot of matchups, protect Mentor with [card]Duress[/card] and Counters and use your card advantage engine to flood the board with tokens.

Figuring out the best third deck was hard. Since we were locked in on playing Esper Dragons and Atarka Red the only remaining fetchland was [card]Windswept Heath[/card] so we tried to work on decks that used that the best.

Our frontrunner for a long time was Abzan Aggro but it really felt like a fallback deck in case we did not find anything better. Initially we thought the mana base would cause a lot of problems but after working on it we came to a heavy painland centric mana base that Brazil also came up with on their own and it solved a lot of the problems we had but still something felt like it was missing.

A big problem I had with Abzan was that we were initially splitting a lot of cards with Esper, namely [card]Duress[/card], [card]Ultimate Price[/card] and [card]Shambling Vent[/card]s, but as testing went on the Esper players kept taking more copies of the cards as they were extremely important for Esper and to me not having those cards was too much to overlook and I thought it was best to just let Esper have the cards they wanted and explore our other options while keeping Abzan in our back pocket.

Abzan Rally was extremely underwhelming without access to Jace as it lost a lot of its versatility and power.

Mardu had a lot of strong things going on like [card]Crackling Doom[/card] and [card]Radiant Flames[/card] but had the same problem of sharing cards with Esper and appeared to be a worse version of Abzan without powerful cards like Anafenza and [card]Siege Rhino[/card].

The Italians tried Bant Megamorph for a couple days but told us it wasn’t good enough.

Alex, Shaun and Myself liked Eldrazi a lot but none of the other teams were on board with it so we didn’t test it as much as I would have liked but I thought with the way things were going it was probably the best option since no one else had anything any of us liked.

Enter Temur.

Seat C: Temur – Shau nMcLaren

[deck]
[Lands]
1 Cinder Glade
3 Forest
4 Frontier Bivouac
2 Island
3 Lumbering Falls
2 Mountain
1 Prairie Stream
2 Shivan Reef
4 Windswept Heath
2 Yavimaya Coast
[/Lands]
[Spells]
4 Collected Company
2 Disdainful Stroke
4 Fiery Impulse
2 Negate
2 Temur Charm
[/Spells]
[Creatures]
4 Bounding Krasis
4 Deathmist Raptor
4 Den Protector
2 Heir of the Wilds
4 Rattleclaw Mystic
4 Savage Knuckleblade
[/Creatures]
[Sideboard]
1 Disdainful Stroke
1 Stratus Dancer
2 Surrak Dragonclaw
2 Dispel
2 Encase in Ice
4 Radiant Flames
2 Rending Volley
1 Roast
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

I don’t know where Alex came up with the deck but it used lots of ideas we had from other decks and kind of combined them into one. [card]Windswept Heath[/card] searched [card]Prairie Stream[/card] and [card]Cinder Glade[/card] and being able to fetch for all three colours was a huge deal. [card]Radiant Flames[/card] was one of the best cards when we tested Mardu and we got to use it in this deck also. Since we expected to face Esper 33% of the time, having flash creatures and counters was a good way to get an advantage in that matchup.

The deck tested okay initially but I think everyone got on board when Alex played the deck against Esper and saw how powerful it could be if played optimally so the day before the event we sat down and decided that it was worth the risk to play a new deck even if it was untested for the most part because we didn’t really have anything better as by now Esper had taken way too many cards from Abzan that I was completely off that deck.

After deciding on the three decks we now had to choose who would play which deck. Alex’s and my first thoughts were to have Alex play Red since he had played it at the Pro Tour and Grand Prix and had the most experience with it, have Shaun play Esper since he plays a lot of Control and me play Temur.

However, Shaun told us that he didn’t really feel comfortable playing Esper without testing it so we had to change our plans and had him play Temur, me Atarka Red and Alex on Esper. We knew we wanted Red in the middle seat and I wanted to be next to Alex in case I had any questions about sideboarding or game states since he had played it more than me and we didn’t want Control in the middle so we had Esper in the A seat, Red B and Temur in C. This is one of the more annoying parts about Team Unified Standard since matchups are much more important it felt really random which deck went in which seat since if you were to go into each match with the knowledge of where the opponents were seating, you could set up your decks so you could win almost every time.

For Team Sealed we did not get to practice near as much as I would have liked due to scheduling and when people arrived so I did not think we were prepared enough for this portion but felt confident if we got through we would do well enough in Constructed that we would Day 2.

Unfortunately, we went 3-4 and did not make the cut, going 1-2 in Sealed and 2-2 in Constructed (Me and Shaun each went 2-2 while Alex went 4-0).

The World Magic Cup is a unique tournament. Since you do not get to choose your teammates there is no way to filter out any potential personality conflicts that can arise and since a lot of the players in our group are among the best players in the world there was often a significant skill gap between players which could make it hard to trust certain matchup results in testing and have meaningful discussions since some voices carry more weight to them then others.

Team Italy won the tournament so it hard to say we went wrong somewhere but it felt like something was missing and we did not accomplish enough in testing but it could be that since it was my first time working with such a large group that my expectations were a little high and thought that we would break the format or something like that.

It is disheartening to not do well in a tournament but overall I had a great trip and I learned a lot from watching players that are a lot better then myself play.

I especially learned a lot playing against Andrea Mengucci when we played the Abzan – Esper Dragons Matchup and it showed me how much more I have to grow as a player if I want to do well at a high level event.