So the Super Bowl will be played in your city, but you can’t get tickets. Not because they’re too expensive, not because they’re sold out, but because the organizers don’t want any fans there. I don’t know about you, but to me this just sounds bizarre. That would never happen, right? Yet it happens in Magic.

The World Championship was in Amsterdam, about 30 minutes from where I live. The World Magic Cup was there the same weekend. Worlds Weekend in Amsterdam, but as a native I couldn’t see anything more than someone on the other side of the world. There wasn’t even a viewing location nearby with side events or whatever. Nothing but a bodyguard turning you away at the door.

I mentioned this on Twitter, and via Eugene Ho I got into contact with Jon Stern and the rest of the Canadian team, who graciously offered to take me and some of my friends as guests, so that we could get a taste of what the atmosphere was like, do some drafts, and stare at Mark Rosewater.

I felt lucky to be there, and I had a great time. I also learned a bunch about magic by watching the players and interacting with them. Hopefully I can get some of what I learned across in this article.

On M14 Limited

While I’m certainly no expert yet, drafting a bunch with the Canadian team and an assorted collection of other magic players from around the world helped me understand quite a bit about the format.

The first thing you will notice is that your color requirements are quite heavy. With a lot of great double-colored spells in every color, it’s hard enough to get your two-color manabase right, let alone to play three colors (or more). Cards like [card]Kalonian Tusker[/card], [card]Chandra’s Outrage[/card], [card]Claustrophobia[/card], [card]Banisher Priest[/card], or [card]Quag Sickness[/card] and [card]Corrupt[/card] make you want to play decks that are heavy in their colors, and these kind of cards are all over the place. With all double colored mana requirements, splitting your manabase 9/8 feels shaky. You’d much rather have a 10/7 or 11/6 split if you can afford it.

This means that if you’ve drafted some [card]Howl of the Night Pack[/card]s and [card]Rumbling Baloth[/card]s, maybe you should pick that [card]Trained Condor[/card] over that [card]Claustrophobia[/card]. A [card]Verdant Haven[/card] or [card]Darksteel Ingot[/card] makes my starting 40 quite often, just to help cast [card]Serra Angel[/card]s and [card]Rumbling Baloth[/card]s in the same deck.

As for general strategies, there are certain color combinations I liked better than others. For example, some of the better green cards pair poorly with some of the better black cards. Take for example how [card]Howl of the Night Pack[/card] and [card]Corrupt[/card] are at odds with each other. I’d rather pair black with any of the other colors. Red is the most likely, to take advantage of [card]Act of Treason[/card]s and cards like [card]Young Pyromancer[/card] for your sacrifice outlets. While a little less likely to happen, pairing white with black can be good too, especially if you can find some [card]Festering Newt[/card]s to go with [card]Bubbling Cauldron[/card] and [card]Angelic Accord[/card]. Having this specific deck actually work is hard to pull off, though, and seems better as a strategy you happen to roll into rather than something you can force.

As for black and blue, it seems like the best versions of the deck are control style decks, with a bunch of one-for-one removal, while being filled with [card]Divination[/card]s and Opportunities, if you can find those. [card]Opportunity[/card] is one of the best uncommons in the set, if not the best, and you’d be wise to pick it over almost anything. The format isn’t that fast, and getting ahead on cards is huge. You can simply keep trading resources, then go up four cards, and it’ll be hard to lose from there.

Blue in general seems like one of the best colors, allowing plenty of viable strategies. For example, I’ve seen plenty of [card]Frost Breath[/card]s and [card]Time Ebb[/card]s come around late, despite them being very good in the UR Tempo deck ([card]Regathan Firecat[/card]s, [card]Marauding Maulhorn[/card]s, and a bunch of ways to get your guys through), which is a deck built on commons nobody picks highly. It feels like one of the better decks in the format. There are also plenty of fliers to be put to use in a UW Skies deck, but I haven’t been very impressed with that deck unless it had a bunch of removal and one or more [card]Opportunity[/card]. Blue-Green seemed fine too, but unexciting.

I very much like the decks where you have something specific going on, like the BR Sacrifice deck with [card]Tenacious Dead[/card]s and [card]Blood Bairn[/card]s; or the tokens plus [card]Fortify[/card] deck; or the UX [card]Elixir of Immortality[/card] control deck, etc. “Just” playing UW with a bunch of fliers is okay, as is GW big creatures, but you need something to put it over the top, or you’ll lose to the decks that do have some form of an nearly unbeatable endgame. I would advise you to think of combos that do something impressive and try to build those combos into your deck. Just don’t start playing terrible cards because of it.

On Standard

When looking at the Standard results from the World Magic Cup, there are two things to remember. The first is that the decks played during the individual championship were obviously built with the expected metagame in mind. A lot of the card slots in the decks were filled with spells and creatures that would do well in a field with plenty of Jund and UWR. Everybody must’ve guessed Reid Duke would be on Jund, Willy Edel on Naya, and Kibler on some sort of Dragon deck, and so on.

The second thing to keep in mind is that during the team event, some choices that seem “odd” or that you’ve pegged as “tech” might just be the result of the fact that you couldn’t play more than four of a card per team. This restriction that comes with the Unified Constructed format mostly just prevents team members from playing the same deck, but sometimes it leads to having to be creative with utility spells. (Only having four [card]Farseek[/card]s makes it hard to play both Jund and Bant control, for example, despite them being different decks with manabases that don’t exclude each other).

From the individual championship, the most interesting deck was definitely Brian Kibler’s:

[deck title=GR Aggro by Brian Kibler]
[Creatures]
4 Arbor Elf
2 Elvish Mystic
4 Flinthoof Boar
3 Scavenging Ooze
4 Strangleroot Geist
4 Ghor-Clan Rampager
4 Hellrider
4 Thundermaw Hellkite
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
3 Mizzium Mortars
4 Domri Rade
[/Spells]
[Lands]
9 Forest
1 Kessig Wolf Run
6 Mountain
4 Rootbound Crag
4 Stomping Ground
[/Lands]
[Sideboard]
2 Pillar of Flame
1 Volcanic Strength
2 Flames of the Firebrand
4 Burning Earth
2 Gruul War Chant
2 Zealous Conscripts
2 Bonfire of the Damned
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

In a field filled with three-color controlling decks (UWR/Flash, Jund), the aggro deck with quad [card]Burning Earth[/card] in its 75 seems like a good choice. The deck performed so well in testing for multiple teams that we saw quite a few copies of the deck played in the team tournament, despite teams having had only a couple of days to test it.

From what I saw (and I did quite a bit of scouting the first day), most teams played Jund in one seat, some form of UWR in another, and an aggressive deck in the third seat. This third seat was most frequently mono-red, but I saw plenty of green-red Kibler style decks as well. The Canadian team had a somewhat different strategy: they played BG control, Bant Hexproof and Kibler’s deck together, avoiding any overlap aside from having to split some [card]Scavenging Ooze[/card]s between the BG and the GR deck.

The GR deck did very well for the team, and [card]Burning Earth[/card] was such a beating against the top decks that I wondered why more people hadn’t moved away from Jund to BG control or from UWR to UW control or added another aggressive deck to their mix. Moving forward, if the Dragonmaster’s deck becomes a major player in the format (which I expect), the step towards two-color and more aggressive decks seems like a logical one (Late edit: it just won the SCG Open and the GP in Warsaw? Well wadda’ya know…). A first step might be adapting this deck from GP Calgary:

[deck title=UW control by Jacob Wilson (Top 8 at GP Calgary)]
[Creatures]
4 Augur of Bolas
1 Snapcaster Mage
4 Restoration Angel
1 Ætherling
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Azorius Charm
4 Think Twice
3 Detention Sphere
1 Jace, Architect of Thought
4 Supreme Verdict
4 Syncopate
4 Sphinx’s Revelation
[/Spells]
[Lands]
4 Glacial Fortress
2 Ghost Quarter
4 Hallowed Fountain
8 Island
1 Moorland Haunt
7 Plains
[/Lands]
[Sideboard]
1 Cavern of Souls
1 Dispel
1 Pithing Needle
3 Celestial Flare
3 Negate
2 Renounce the Guilds
1 Clone
1 Jace, Architect of Thought
1 Ætherling
1 Terminus
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

A top-eight spot in the hands of Jacob Wilson, and a ninth place finish in the hands of Matt Nass shows that going two color is not something that has to cost you. I will gladly pick this deck up when the amount of [card]Burning Earth[/card]s being played in standard increases. For now though, I’d advise you to be the guy that helps up the number of [card]Burning Earth[/card]s while people haven’t adjusted yet.

All the best from around the world,

Jay Lansdaal
iLansdaal on Twitter and MTGO