I went to RQ Vancouver this past weekend and finished 26th out of 1833 at 10-2-1, which earned me the Best of Kha'zix prize card, officially the best Kha'zix in the building, a title I will be looking to maintain for the foreseeable future. I bring it up for one real reason: the person who builds your tournament software was in the same 1833 player grind you were, refreshing the same standings page, sweating the same win-and-ins. We don't make this stuff from the outside. For players, by players. (If you want to meet the people behind the company, we did a deck tech)

-Zain Nayer, TopDeck.gg

This week, two pieces about reading your format. Dylan Skorish on when to stop staying open and force your bomb, and Stefen Delgado on whether Lorcana's Infinity has an identity of its own yet.

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When you open a bomb, the disciplined pick and the right pick aren't always the same card.

By Dylan Skorish

Veteran limited Magic players often take for granted the actual complexity level of any given draft. The process of drafting itself is full of uncountable micro-decisions and inflection points that can radically alter how your final 40 cards end up. Concepts that many players find rudimentary are built on a foundation that many often don’t fully grasp themselves but have been learned through repetition. 

Am I respecting my curve? How is my fixing? How am I planning on winning my games? 

(For the kind of decks I often indulge in: How do I avoid decking myself?)

Even subconsciously, seasoned players are calculating these factors and more when they make their picks. As a self proclaimed “medium” player, these are the kind of built in heuristics that have ingrained themselves into my brain, enough that I’ll often find myself questioning why I didn’t take the dual land for my splash over the mid playable that ended up rotting in my sideboard while I’m picking between frozen pot pie options at Trader Joe’s (The handheld ones are delicious!). 

Recently, I have been trying to think more about that crucial moment of the draft that you truly commit. I’m not sure if the Arena zoomers are even aware of the concept of Drafting the Hard Way but I know many of us “Uncs” still have Ben Stark’s words clanging around in our heads. I would never want to paint myself as more knowledgeable than one of the greatest limited players of all time but I do think it’s worth critically examining how we approach staying open in this new modern era of card design. 

More than ever the prospect of trainwrecking has been diminished by the sheer quality of commons and especially uncommons that Wizards is pumping out.  The rares and mythics have similarly become even more juiced to keep up with unending powercreep, enough so that I believe it’s worth asking the question: When is it correct to throw caution to the wind and force it?  How often when you P1P1 an Emeritus of Ideation are you ending up in an Orzhov deck? How often when you P1P1 Practiced Offense are you ending up in Jeskai creatureless control? How often when you P1P1 a Together as One do you end up in a deck that can only ever cast it for converge 2?

This isn’t to say it’s not possible, there are times when you are legitimately cut off to the point that what’s likely the best card in your deck simply isn’t an option. This is naturally more likely to happen with an aggressively slanted card like Practiced Offense that is going to have diminishing returns in a deck that is splashing it and you’re less likely to be naturally curving out. But even in that case it’s worth asking just how bad do the white cards you’re seeing have to be to jump shift on your power? Of course, these aren’t questions with simple answers. It could be that your pick 2 after drafting your broken white aggressive card has something like a Snarl Song and nothing close to it on power level then naturally you want to just take the strongest card in the pack and keep your mind open. 

But for me, I’ve been feeling more and more lately in the drafts where I’m opening Grade-A BOMBS that I might be overvaluing the prospect of flexibility for the fear of “missing the open lane” when I would have been better served maximizing that power. This isn’t meant to be prescriptive, that you should be throwing on the blinders the first time you see the rare symbol, but rather challenging you to think past the notion that only inexperienced players lock in on that first card that says rare on it. I think it’s worth expanding your game to sometimes do what is, on paper, not the right thing to do when the situation calls for it. These ingrained heuristics that the “medium” players among us rely on to guide us are heuristics and not hard rules for a reason. I’ve started to ask myself: Is what a great player would do in this situation is draft like a lunatic on a mission? Bad players don’t understand the rules, “medium” players follow the rules, and the great players know when it’s right to break them.

Let’s break some rules, baby!

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Infinity and Core keep producing the same decks. The format needs a reason to exist beyond a different card pool.

By Stefen Delgado

Lorcana is entering a stage where format identity matters. With Disney Lorcana Challenge Indianapolis featuring Infinity Constructed as the main event, the format will face its biggest test yet. Rotation has already changed the way people look at Lorcana, and with Attack of the Vine! right around the corner, the conversation now becomes: What role Infinity should have alongside Core?

It’s hard to know how far ahead Disney Lorcana planned for rotation and supporting multiple formats, but it’s easy to see how much that decision affects both new and veteran TCG players. Players familiar with other games understand the importance of rotation and how it keeps the game healthy. New players can view Core Constructed as cleaner entry points into the game. Infinity (or more regularly known in other games as eternal formats) fixes this concern by keeping the card pool rooted to the first set, The First Chapter. Different formats, different ban lists, but does it create a different experience?

Most recently, we’ve seen competitive events in both formats yield two similar shells in Amber Emerald known as Dogs (or Chernadogs in Infinity). They both follow similar strategies, go wide, know when to quest when it overwhelms your opponent, and include just enough disruption to even out the playing field. Recent event results have shown above-average win rates and now players are warping around more or less the same deck in two different formats.

So with where we’re at, and where we’re heading (both physically and metaphorically), we need to look at the success beyond Indianapolis; we need to see what impact it leaves behind for stores, tournament organizers, and ultimately the players to continue supporting the format afterwards.

“Great, we have an eternal format, now what?” Ravensburger shouldn’t be asking whether or not Infinity needs to exist. They need to ask themselves “How do we give Infinity the identity it deserves?” Then the rest of the community can treat, adopt, and appreciate it just as much as they appreciate Core Constructed. Indianapolis may prove that Infinity can draw attention. What comes next will determine whether it can build its own identity.

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