The Road to Pro Tour FRF - by Noah Cohen

Before digging into the meat and potatoes of my first article for Nerd Rage Gaming regarding my experience at Pro Tour Fate Reforged, I would like to explain who I am and why I am here. For starters, I am 16 years old, a junior in high school, and reside in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. I try to attend as many SCG Open’s as possible and have accomplished 2 Open Series Top 8's (both of which have come in legacy), 3 Standard Open Top 16's, 2 Legacy Open Top 16's and 1 other GP day 2.

I qualified for Pro Tour Fate Reforged through a 13-2 record at Grand Prix New Jersey (Legacy). After sliding into day two with a record of 7-2, I only lost a total of two games on Sunday in order to achieve the perfect 6-0 record that I needed to qualify. Leading up to this tournament I didn’t have any Pro Tour aspirations. I figured that it wouldn’t be worth all of the work needed to get there and that grinding the Open Series would be just as exhilarating. Although I didn’t have any Pro Tour aspirations, I don’t want anyone to think that I did not prepare for the GP. I started my practice two weeks prior to the event. In the first week, I went through and theory crafted all possible variations of BUG Delver and how those variations would matchup against the field, leaving the second week to strictly testing. The second week of testing was brutal.

My daily schedule consisted of:
6AM: Get up to go to school (I am still a small child, remember)
3PM: Leave school to go to soccer practice
5PM: Get home, eat dinner, and watch any new legacy videos on any magic website with content
7PM: Start on my homework for school
10PM: Get on MTGO and play legacy
1-2AM: Finish my last match on MTGO, take notes on what happened, and go to sleep

Fortunately, the person that I was play-testing with on MTGO was fellow teammate, Joe Lossett, who happens to be pretty good at Legacy. So, now that I put all of this work in and had a successful journey in New Jersey, I am off to the Pro Tour.

“Awesome.” If I could sum up my Pro Tour experience in one word, it would be “Awesome”. Prior to this tournament, to my knowledge, I had never played in a sanctioned Modern tournament and hadn’t done much drafting, so I didn’t feel very good going in. Unfortunately, on top of not knowing either format very well, I did not get to do much testing because of school. I flew into Baltimore on Wednesday night with a Phyrexian Zoo modern deck in my backpack and a few packs to practice drafting with. As soon as I got to my friend, Danny Goldstein’s house, where I would stay for the night until we drove up to Washington D.C. the following morning, I found out that everyone in the house was planning to play burn. Obviously, I wasn’t stoked to hear this because burn is not that exciting to play, but since they had tested more than myself, and seemed to know what they were talking about, I threw together a blur of burn cards and got ready to sling spells at my opponents’ faces in D.C. This was somewhat relieving because I was able to do a couple more drafts, now that I had more time, because I didn’t feel like I needed to practice playing burn as much as I would another modern deck that planned to interact. In a blink of an eye, it was Friday morning and I was at the convention site, waiting in line to collect all of my awesome Pro Tour swag prior to the tournament. I was really excited to be less than an hour away from participating in my first Pro Tour, although I only had four practice drafts under my belt and less than a dozen matches with burn.

Draft:
My draft went well, I settled into an Abzan deck that splashed red for a Crackling Doom and had about seven pieces of removal.

Round 1 (Loss): (1-2)
I played against an older Norwegian man who was playing a Jeskai deck. For some reason, I had notes on every game of this match because it was interesting to me.
- Game 1: I won this one very convincingly because my opponent only played a Plains, an Island and then nothing else for the rest of the game while I beat him down with my creatures
- Game 2: There was a series of turns in the game that were very interesting. On turn 5, I had a smoke teller and morphed abzan guide on the table with the 5 mana 5/4 vanilla Rhino as the only gas left in my hand. Instead of casting the 5/4, I simply passed the turn with mana to flip my Abzan Guide up at the end of his turn, in attempt to play around an End Hostilities that would end the game on the spot if he had. He ended up winning the game by playing a bunch of first strike creatures that held off my aggression for long enough that he went over the top of me with
- Game 3: I was forced to commit more creatures to the board then I would have wanted to in theory and had lethal on board, but then he cast the End Hostilities that I expected to be there the game prior. After the match, we shook hands and he congratulated me on intelligently playing around End Hostilities in Game 2 because he had it in his hand.

Round 2 (Loss): (1-2)
- This match I played against a fellow skilled player, Michael Majors.
- All three games, he played mastery of unseen on turn two, which made life very difficult for me.
- The only specific detail I remember other than that was that in Game 3, he attacked for just under 100 damage, and I cast Channel Harm.
- This nearly gave him a heart attack because he thought that I could re-direct the damage back at his face. Sadly, this was not the case and it simply prolonged my death for one measly turn

Round 3 (VICTORY): (2-0)
- Going into this round, I didn’t feel too great, since I am obviously 0-2 at this point.
- Although the win was nice and I assume it was a fairly convincing one since my only notes for the match were, “Crushed with dragons”

Round 4 (Loss): 5-Color Domain Zoo (1-2) vs. Immanuel Gerchenson (Grand Prix Madrid and Seville Champion)
- This was a very close match, going to all three games, once again
- In the third game, he was on the play with a Wild Nacatl at the ready
- He then proceeded to quickly dispatch my Goblin Guide with a lightning helix on his second turn
- I was beginning to turn the game around after he killed by Guide with a Lightning Bolt on his Nacatl and another Guide of my own, but this was no match for his Snapcaster Mage, which flashed back the Helix and ended the game by gaining him too much life for me to handle

Round 5 (Win): Tron (2-0)
- Even though I lost the round prior to this deck, I felt good about my deck and how I was playing
- Although, this game I made a crucial mistake by casting a Lava Spike instead of suspending a Rift Bolt during my turn
- This was a mistake, because if my opponent would have had a Wurmcoil Engine on the turn after, then I wouldn’t have been able to kill him on the next turn, since the rift bolt essentially takes 2 turns to fire off
- Fortunately, there were not any Wurmcoil Engines in sight and we won the match

Round 6 (Loss): Amulet Combo (0-2)
- This was my Match that I lost that didn't go to 3 games
- I remember not being the happiest kid after the match considering my opponent thoroughly obliterated me and then after the match suggested that he would teach me how to play Amulet
- This gave me a good chuckle and all I remember saying was, “Sorry man, although your deck is awesome, I’m going to have to hold off on the lesson this time.”

Round 7 (Win): Phyrexian Zoo (2-1)

- My opponent had a nice draw in game 2, putting a Become Immense and Boros Charm together to kill me
- Unfortunately for him, he did not see any of his 4 Leyline of Sanctities from his sideboard and he was no match for my burn spells

Round 8 (Win): Scapeshift (2-1) Vs. Ben Stark
- I was obviously not thrilled to see that I would have to be battling against a Hall of Famer to make day 2, but in the past I have had a fairly good track record against big-name professionals and I was certainly up for the challenge
- Game 1: All I wrote down was, “Little kid luck.” So, apparently I had a pretty good hand and killed him on turn 3. I vaguely remember casting 3 Lightning Bolts in one turn.
- Game 2: I didn’t have the best of hand, and his Sakura-Tribe Elder + Farseek were able to boost him into the extra lands he needed to Scapeshift me.
- Game 3: This game, I took a line that might have been incorrect, but I definitely gave it lot of thought. On turn 3, I had 2 Swiftspears and a Grim Lavamancer out with him at 15 from 2 attacks and a shock land untapped. I had the choice to either Molten Rain his shock land and get in to drop him to eight from my attackers or cast 2 Lightning Bolts, use my Grim Lavamancer’s ability, and attack him with my Swiftspears to drop him to 1. I chose this line of putting him to 1 because it makes him not able to fetch or shock and he would need to have both Anger of the Gods and Remand to stay in the game. There are benefits for both lines of play, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for doing the opposite.
- So obviously, as Ben scooped up his cards, I was super excited that I had made Day 2 of my first Pro Tour, but I would like to focus less on how awesome this experience was for me and focus more on how great of an opponent and sportsman Ben was.
- After the match, I would say that Ben and I talked for a good 20 minutes and I don’t know many people who would do that. We joked, laughed, and most importantly he gave me some great advice on how to conduct myself and what I need to do in order to keep doing well, especially in the Pro Tour setting.


Round 9 (Loss): (1-2) Vs. Alexander Hayne
- We had an awesome game 1, which lasted around 30 minutes and somehow I miraculously won. A well-timed crux of fate and the good ol’ decking. Good thing Alex activated his Tasigur 4 times this match, or I wouldn’t have been ahead in the mill race. No, but seriously I thought I was crushed this game and was able to barely pull out the win.
- In games 2 and 3, he won fairly quickly compared to our first game, but I wasn’t disappointed with how I played

Round 10 (Loss): (1-2)
- All I remember about this match was that I got hammered game one
- Game 2, I think that I 10-for-1’d him with a crux and obviously won
- Game 3, we played a very close game and he got me with a couple flyers post-crux

Round 11 (Bye): I’m not above the free win

Round 12 (Loss): Infect (1-2)
- To be honest, I remember nothing about this match other than the result that I wrote down and the fact that I quickly dropped and started team-drafting with my friends afterwards.

All in all, this was an “awesome” tournament and I am going to do everything I can to get back as soon as possible. Thanks for supporting me and TeamNRG. Remember to head to www.NerdRageGaming.com for all your Magic needs including NRG apparel.  I encourage you to comment/ask questions!!  Thank you for reading.