After Pro Tour: Avacyn Restored (#PTAVR), I decided to revisit this article and examine how people did at #PTAVR (which was much smaller) based on how they qualified. Another important aspect going into #PTAVR was the formation of a number of teams, and I decided to look into how the various teams performed as well. This article was originally planned to be named “The Rise of the Super Team” and focus on the performance of SCGBlack and ChannelFireball  (CFB), but CFB essentially didn't show up, failing to put even one member into the Top 8 of a Pro Tour for the first time since the team, as it exists now, was formed at Pro Tour Amsterdam.

Multiple Invite Hierarchy

For this analysis, each player could only be counted for one invitation category, which necessitated the creation of a hierarchy to deal with players who had earned multiple invitations to the event. The goal of my hierarchy was to count the primary way the player was invited and avoid counting invitations gained incidentally in obtaining that invite. The hierarchy I ended up with (after consultation with a few other people was):

• Pro Player Club (PPC) Levels 6 to 8
• Pro Tour Hall of Fame
• Pro Player Club (PPC) Levels 4 to 5
• PTQ Wins (both online and paper)
• Pro Tour Top 25
• GP Top 4
• Pro Player Club Level 3

Legend to the Charts

Before the charts are presented, here is a legend for them:

• Number (#) – Number of players who qualified (and showed up) from that invitation category.
• Percent (%) – The percentage of players in the Pro Tour who were invited from that invitation category.
• # Day 2 – Number of people who day 2ed from that invitation category.
• % Day 2 – Percentage of players in the invitation category who made Day 2.
• # Cash – Number of people who cashed from that invitation category.
• % Cash – Percentage of players in the invitation category who cashed.
• # Top 50 – Number of people who made Top 50 from that invitation category.
• % Top 50 – Percentage of players in the invitation category who made Top 50.
• # Top 8 – Number of people who made Top 8 from that invitation category.
• Average Constructed – Average number of Constructed points earned by players in that category.
• Average Limited – Average number of Limited points earned by players in that category.
• Average Points – Sum of Average Limited and Average Constructed.
• Average Money – Average amount of money earned by players in that category.
• % of Money Won – Percentage of the overall prize pool won by players in that category.
• % Money Won/%Composition – This is % of Money Won divided by %.

Pro Tour: Avacyn Restored

Year: 2012

PTQ Format: Modern

Constructed Format: Full Innistrad Block Constructed

Limited Format: Avacyn Restored ×3 Draft

#PTAVR had a number of interesting occurrences. The first, and most important, was the collapse of Level 8 performance mostly affected by CFB’s poor performance (see below), as only one-third of them cashed, and their percentage of the total prize pool was barely ahead of where they would be as just a fraction of the field.

Close in importance was the excellent performance by the Hall of Fame members in attendance, who had the highest average points earned in Block Constructed. Another thing of note was that Limited performance (with the exception of Level 7s) was pretty close to even across all invite categories, backing up the theory proposed by some that Avacyn Restored Limited is not a particularly skill-based format.

The Sponsor’s Exceptions and Special Invite (also known as the "David Williams’s Magic Career Memorial Invite") once again produced no notable results (as expected), and also as expected, PTQ winners (with the exception of the two who Top 8’ed) performed relatively poorly.

Teams

As mentioned earlier, going into the Pro Tour, I assumed a Top 8 full of CFB and SCGBlack (with SCGBlue dutifully drafting on Day 2), but ummmmm . . . then the Pro Tour actually happened:

As can be seen here, Jurkovich's team (consisting of Robert Jurkovic, Ivan Floch, Stanislav Cifka, Lukas Jaklovsky, Jan Brodzak, all playing Reanimator) had almost 2 match points in Constructed over all the other teams, whereas the deck that won the event (Hallelujah) performed the worst of all the team decks.

Mathias' team, consisting of almost exclusively Magic Online grinders (Michael Hetrick, Ricky Sidher, Shahar Shenhar, Kyle Stoll, Andrejs Prost, Matthius Hunt, Jason Schousboe, Matt Nass, Josh Mcclain), performed extremely well in Limited.

Team CFB performed worse than not only SCGBlack, but surprisingly SCGBlue as well. Jurovich’s team and SCGBlack performed the best in terms of money won (thanks to a skewed payout system), but look for the members of Hunt’s team to perform well in the future, as they had the highest average points of all teams in the Pro Tour.

Conclusion

While it was fun to gather this data and compare, performance at one event is in no way statistically significant, and I assume CFB’s failings were simply a fluke (or the team depended on Owen being a jerk, and him being nice threw off the dynamic).

Team performance will have to be examined at future events to see if the performances made by SCGBlue and SCGBlack are sustainable. What is important to note is that being on a team is now more important than ever to Pro Tour success, and not finding a strong playgroup is very detrimental to performance.

Bonus Section: Silver Players

With the Pro Tour season over, the inevitable complaints from players with Silver status in the Pro Players Club has reared its head. Silver gives no benefits (as anyone at this level will already have the byes off PWPs), but we all knew this going into the season. Giving Silver players an invite to the Pro Tour would make the decisions of many players (players conceded or drew in the last round of the Pro Tour with the knowledge that obtaining Silver would not matter to them) wrong and would deteriorate their trust in WotC’s ability to stick to its decisions.

Smaller Pro Tours are better as they not only create more interesting coverage but provide more opportunities for PTQ winners to play against the greats of past and present. For anyone who doesn’t think this last point matters, just look at this story from coverage from #PTAVR:

@dieplstks if they just hand out invites to these ppl i should start twitter grinding instead of ptqs since complaining clearly is higher EV

— Black Cat (@BlackCatMTG) May 17, 2012

– Chris Mascioli

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