Greetings once again! This time, I’m writing to my readers live from the hotel lobby of the Sheraton Grand hotel in beautiful Music City, the one and only Nashville, TN. After a week of compressed testing and a blistering fast exit from the Pro Tour, I’m left wondering what went wrong. Certainly, I was less skilled at Aetherworks Marvel spinning than my good friend Jiachen Tao, but the losses piled on so quickly I barely had a chance to analyze why I was losing. Looking back, I can spot precisely four instances where a decision I made cost me big-time at this event. Let’s start from the top, in the hopes that my Pro Tour post-mortem will be of use to all of you looking to learn how to better analyze your losses and find ways to improve even in defeat.

0: I did not optimize my health and energy levels prior to the tournament!

To start, I’ll be bringing a good portion of my own food, so I won’t be as tempted to break my diet for the various and sundry treats that you can find abounding at every convenience store and vending machine. Fava beans and dried roasted chickpeas are big ones, as they are not as high in calories as almonds and peanuts, so I’ll be able to pig out on them without going overboard. (And let me tell you, I love pigging out on food, but if I don’t bring my own food, it’ll end up being Pocky and flavored KitKat bars in Japan for me.)

I’ll be obliging myself to do a set of ten or fifteen push-ups between testing games as well, as over the course of the day, I’ll get in upwards of two or three hundred push-ups. I occasionally used to do push-ups at tournaments (ten for every match win, twenty for every match loss, and thirty for an unintentional draw) but I let the habit die. Not anymore! This sort of physical exertion keeps energy levels higher and helps you fight fatigue over the course of a long tournament.

The third, biggest thing, is working on maintaining a healthy sleep schedule going into the tournament. This one is really tricky for most players, as I know from experience that it’s almost too easy to ruin your sleep from late nights jamming matchups and drafting on MTGO. Setting yourself a strict bedtime and wake-up time is no fun, to be sure, but it also helps immensely with your tournament-day energy to follow the same routine you’ve been following the whole week. If this is professional Magic, it behooves us to treat it like a job, and that means following a routine to help us be our best. Anything else is just spewing equity.

But enough about intangibles and the tired old trope about taking care of oneself, let’s talk in-game decisions!

1: My first and second draft picks!

Of course, I saw the second Neheb alongside a Cartouche of Strength in the second pack, leading me to another tough decision. At that point, having passed Neheb, I should have recognized that I was likely to get into a fight with a drafter downstream if I passed two Nehebs, and that it might not have been worth it to try to make Minotaurs work. On the other hand, I also passed a Khenra Charioteer in the first pack, leading me to believe that someone two or three seats to my left might end up in that color combination, as well! I was truly next-leveling myself at this point, regretting my decision not to snap off the more powerful, risky choice, and I thought that if the player to my right passed a Neheb, it might make sense to pass-cut the first one, and get the hook-up in packs one and three. It wasn’t pretty, but it was my line of logic. I also strongly dislike Green in this draft format, so I was disincentivized to take Cartouche, and the rest of the draft continued from this decision. There were very few playable Red or Black two-drops in pack one, and I was forced to take some underwhelming ones in pack three to fill out my deck. I hoped for a 2-1 finish on the back of a big pile of removal and high-quality Minotaurs, but in the back of my mind I knew that my deck would need a lot to go right in order to salvage this draft. Sure, the packs broke poorly for me, and the whole draft ended up being very strange from my perspective as well, but I faced two tough decisions right off the bat, and I was unprepared and flustered by those choices. This is a sure sign that I hadn’t gotten quite enough breadth of draft experience, and though I knew exactly how to draft W/x Aggro, I was lost trying to cobble together. That inexperience showed in my first round, against Hall of Famer Gabriel Nassif.

2: I gave Gab an out, and he spiked!

3: I played into Manglehorn in the Marvel Semi-Mirror!

To be fair, if I’d played Woodweaver's Puzzleknot instead of Aetherworks Marvel that turn, my opponent would have Manglehorned that card, leaving my Marvel to come into play tapped on the subsequent turn, but that would still have been leagues better than losing my key combo piece. I knew that the creature-based Temur Marvel list had only three or four Negates to interact with a Marvel on the stack, and I had Dispel to protect it, so unless I wanted to play around double Negate, my play was almost needlessly aggressive. To be fair, there is merit to playing around Negate + Dispel, or double Negate, rather than a single Manglehorn, but based on the way my opponent played the game it made more sense for them to have an artifact removal spell rather than multiple counterspells. I regret my decision, despite there being a potential line of logic that might have led me there, specifically because I made the decision hastily rather than making a difficult choice after weighing multiple options. Even had I come to the wrong conclusion about what to play around after much deliberation, that would have been preferable to getting taken by surprise after making a decision without considering the possible answers my opponent could have.

I highly suggest that all players take the time to do some sort of post-mortem for every tournament, success or failure, but it’s usually the critical misses that prompt the most introspection. Though my Pro year has been reasonably successful up to this point, I fear that I may end up writing it in for the last leg of the season, and exercises like this help stave off complacency and mediocrity. I hope you find the opportunities to do similar exercises, and as always, feel free to share those retrospectives with me in the comments. I’d be much obliged to give some feedback and advice on any well-considered self-examination!

This coming weekend is the SCG Team Open in Louisville, KY, and I’ll be battling alongside Jim Davis and Frank Skarren. This will be my first foray into Topless Legacy, and I’m excited, but the teammates demand that I wear my team jersey rather than show my support for the new format by showing some skin. Bunch of party poopers . . .  Wish us luck, and if I see any of you there, feel free to say hi. It looks like it’s going to be a great event!