One of the major national tournament organizers slotted a Premodern $1,000 tournament onto the schedule of their upcoming visit to the Northeast.

This created an immediate hubbub in the New York City community. Are we going? Are we all going? How are we going to get there? Well of course we are going. If the nice people from Virginia are going to recognize us our little format, that's something. Plus, the meaningful prize pool is going to attract folks from all over so it's almost our moral obligation to kick their asses back to their home states, right?

The Premodern community has long been willing to travel absurd distances for essentially no prizes.

When I finished third at the 2022 North American Premodern Championship, then the largest tournament of its kind (and also the first Premodern event of any kind I had ever played)... I went up to Boston and got a hotel for multiple nights for literally this stamped Mishra's Factory:

Third place. Had to beat Aaron Dicks in the quarterfinals. That was my whole prize!

And I wasn't nothin'. One of the big draws for me was just that Olle Rade, Pro Tour Hall of Famer and PT Columbus Champion was coming all the way from g-d Sweden to tap his Llanowar Elves for Survival of the Fittest.

Then a couple of the enterprising folks in Brooklyn and Queens had their own ideas. Why travel to Connecticut to play for $1,000? We could just have our own $1,000 tournaments in NYC; slightly bigger than the usual meetups, still attracting folks from neighboring areas, and - thanks to the prize pools - ensuring a higher standard of play and deck selection.

The first of these for the quarter was held last weekend at a volleyball court in Queens, hosted by multi-format juggernaut, Dave Kaplan:

The last big cash tournament in NYC was a $1.5k Sacred Torch Showdown at Bifrost Games back in September.

I had been telling myself that I would just play 12/12 ever since LobsterCon 2023. I knew 12/12 was the best deck then, but outsmarted myself. Then I didn't play it again at Sacred Torch. I was dead set to play - to finally play - at the Volleyball $1k.

So, this is of course what I registered:

Burn | Premodern | Michael Flores

• Creatures (16)
• 4 Ball lightning
• 4 Grim Lavamancer
• 4 Jackal Pup
• 4 Mogg Fanatic

• Instants (17)
• 1 Lava Dart
• 4 Fireblast
• 4 Incinerate
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 4 Shock

• Enchantments (2)
• 2 Sulfuric Vortex

• Artifacts (5)
• 2 Cursed Scroll
• 3 Urza's Bauble

• Lands (20)
• 9 Mountain
• 3 Barbarian Ring
• 4 Boodstained Mire
• 4 Wooded Foothills

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Cursed Scroll
• 3 Lava Dart
• 4 Price of Progress
• 2 Pyroblast
• 1 Overload
• 3 Red Elemental Blast
• 1 Sulfuric Vortex

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I could give you all kinds of reasons. I really did map every known player and guess what deck they'd bring. Like Dave Kaplan himself? Dave always Top 8s every tournament, never deviates from best deck 12/12. There were two 12/12 players at the volleyball event.

Both made Top 8.

The previous week my "grandson" Etai Kurtzman won the warmup meetup with my Mono-Red Burn deck.

Let's be honest: I was probably grasping for reasons to play Burn. It's my favorite deck of all time! Etai's win was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

I had a long discussion with my Spike Colony co-host Lanny Huang about why we choose the decks we choose. No one thinks Grow-A-Tog is a good deck. No one but Lanny. Rich Shay, generally regarded as Premodern's most ingenious strategic player, is famous for telling Lanny he'd have a perfectly good deck if he just cut the Miracle Grow elements for some tried-and-true 12/12s.

But Lanny won the Premodern Showdown Series in 2023 with GAT, besting Rich himself in the Finals with it.

No one thinks GAT is good. No one but Lanny. I knew Lanny was going to be on GAT, and one of my infinite contributing reasons to choosing Burn was just that it's good against GAT. Rule #1 is never lose to Lanny if you can help it.

I'm very cognizant of my limitations as a player. One of the decks I considered was Elves. I think that, relative to the field, I am a solid Elves player. But relative to the platonic ideal, I make the optimal Elves play only about 72% of the time.

My very wise grandson Etai asked me a simple question: "Imagine Elves rates 100 out of 100 possible points. Is Burn greater than 72 points?"

I am not sure how many points Burn has, but I do think it's more than 72/100 Elves.

"Then you should play Burn," Etai continued, "if you believe you will make the optimal play over 99% of the time. It's just math."

Lanny would say I lead with emotions, but we're going to go with It's just math.

Round One: Mike Harris with U/W 12/12

Mike was one of the key players I metagamed against. He won Sacred Torch with Full English Breakfast back in September, but I wasn't sure he'd repeat with it.

I had Mike on either Full English Breakfast or 12/12; I could win both matchups.

FEB is very sideboard dependent. If Mike gets Chill, it's a game. If he doesn't, it's a blowout.

The problem with the matchup is that unlike against most other Chill decks, I can't really sideboard in all my Blasts because they suck against everything in his deck that isn't a Chill. But if he doesn't have Chill in play?

My sideboard strategy is all Lava Darts and Price of Progress. I can pin his Birds of Paradise and Hermit Druid with Lava Dart; and his deck of 22 nonbasic lands (including 13 pain lands) is meat to my PoPs.

Mike wins the roll and of course leads on Island.

He had kept seven on the play, so I was pretty sure I was dead.

Yep... turn two 12/12.

This is what you're afraid of if you're Burn. 12/12 on the play is mathematically unbeatable in Game 1. They have to forget to attack or something. Consequently, you have to work really hard to take the match... and it's a lot of work.

I queered my main deck, moving a Lava Dart into the fourth Urza's Bauble slot, just so I could get a sixth Red Elemental Blast in my sideboard. The Blasts are awesome across the field but in major part disrupt the entire 12/12 combo two-for-one for only a single mana. Etai told me that he thought six Blasts was too many. I swapped a fateful Overload in place of the last one.

With sixfive Blasts and an Overload you have a really potent deck for 12/12 and many other Blue opponents. The problem here is that even if you win Game 2, you're on the draw in Game 3, which limits the ability to work over 12/12 with one-mana interaction somewhat. You can do it, but you usually have to try without a clock in play for the first few turns.

I think that Burn has about a 70% win rate in sideboard games, but if you're losing Game 1 100% of the time, that's only an even matchup... And you've devoted a lot of your sideboard to basic Island. Luckily you don't lose 100% of Game 1s.

But! Heroes did in fact lose this one.

Game 2 Mike shipped to five, and it was an easy win for the good guys. I could have won on turn four with Pyroblast coverage but I wanted to see how Mike sideboarded. So, instead it was a bunch of Mogg Fanatics eventually attacking him to single digits for like eleven turns.

Game 3 I kept a one land hand that also had:

Because I've read Slow Playing the Beatdown I did not deploy my Jackal Pup on turn one.

Mike, having kept seven, played the scripted turn two 12/12. This was his board position:

We didn't run out our Jackal Pup for a reason!

Pyroblast the Vision Charm?

Mike responded with Gush...

... leaving him with only the Dreadnought in play.

With Mike on the play, the really dangerous card in this spot is Daze. If he had Daze I'd have been cooked right then and there, but Gush meant that he would either have to Foil my Pyroblast or lose his 12/12 in a devastating exchange.

Predictably, he Foiled my Pyroblast.

What I really wanted to draw was a land of some sort, but instead I got a Ball Lightning. No worries, though!

I waited until Mike's upkeep - when, remember, he still had no lands whatsoever in play.

"Overload?"

Foil #2!!!

That was all but one of his cards :(

This could have gone so many ways.

Had I just drawn a land, I could have Red Elemental Blasted his Foil. That really would have put Mike behind.

But! It was simply playing Overload at all that was the mistake.

I did a whole podcast recently about how Overload is unplayable and you should play Mogg Salvage instead.

Jared Doucette won his large Premodern event up in MA with Burn on the same day, packing a full play set of Mogg Salvage in the sideboard. Had I had Mogg Salvage, I could have waited for Mike to play his Island, destroyed it for zero mana instead of the only one I had, and covered with my Red Elemental Blast, even having failed to draw a land.

Instead?

I started this first of three $1,000 tournaments...

0-1

Round Two: Cam Fulton with Enchantress

Cam has my number. I beat him in the Top 8 of the Bearded Dragon $1k (where I also started 0-2), but of the entire New York City Premodern community, he's been my nemesis. Cam beat me with Elves to steal the top spot at the very first local meetup I ever played; and two days before this event he spoiled my 4-0 with Enchantress-over-Orzhov Midrange.

I had Cam on either Elves or Enchantress. I was guessing Elves even though he'd played Enchantress on Thursday.

Elves is a great matchup; Enchantress... almost unwinnable.

Enchantress has so many different ways to beat Burn they're almost pointless to catalog. Just note that this is achievable main deck:

He can get that combo in Game 1! With Sterling Grove to set it up!

I somehow won Game 1 by throwing my hand at Cam.

Games Two and Three he had no fewer than two of these in play in each:

• Circle of Protection: Red
• Solitary Confinement
• Sphere of Law
• Worship

In one game I thought Cam had erred by turning all his enchantments into dudes with Opalesence. I could Shock his Circle of Protection: Red, Fireblast his Sphere of Law, and... He just gestured at the Sterling Grove also in The Red Zone.

This is a horrendous matchup and Cam just always has my number anyway.

0-2

At this point I was an Aura that costs to give a creature -2/-0.

How could I be so bad?

Was my deck choice terrible?

Lanny said I chose my deck with my heart and not my head. "I thought you were going to play 12/12 finally," he reminded me.

All I could do was play my best the rest of the tournament and try to salvage the day emotionally. It was hard, though. I didn't even want to do push-ups any more.

Round Three: Andrew Walker with Enchantress

You may have noticed that I played Mike Harris Round One, mentioned that Jared Doucette won the same day in MA, and was now up against Andrew Walker. The whole Premodcast was battling on Saturday!

Andrew carefully locked me up with Solitary Confinement in Game 1; then started drawing five cards per action. In the middle of one of his deep stacks he Tutored for Sacred Mesa, then started tapping Serra Sanctum to power it up.

Was this going to be a 0-3 day?

I don't remember how I won Game 2. I think he must have stumbled because over the past two rounds I think you must by now understand what a bad matchup Enchantress is for Our Hero.

Game 3 I opened on Grim Lavamancer... But Andrew responded with Oath of Druids. This was going to be sticky. I didn't want to give him a "free" Enchantress, but the bigger problem was if he just got Phantom Nishoba, which I knew was in his 75.

Grim Lavamancer killed himself to death and I just passed into Andrews Turn Three.

He shrugged and played an Argothian Enchantress he already had.

This could be fantastic, I thought.

I rode his Oath, triggered because he had an Enchantress and I had binned my Lavaman. I was right! It was fantastic! Ball Lightning was the third card down.

I played my third land and cast the Ball Lightning I had in hand.

Twelve damage!

No creatures left in play! Andrew chump blocked one of the Balls, knowing that another lucky Oath on my part could be catastrophic. So, make that eleven.

He hard cast Phantom Nishoba the next turn, but the double digit swing I got the previous turn more than made up for my lost Lavaman.

On the scoreboard!

1-2

Round Four: David Tao with Full English Breakfast

David is one of my dearest friends, and a big reason I've become so invested in Premodern.

To say I owed him one discounts the other one I owe him!

Obviously going to write about this weekend and probably do 100 podcasts but this pic by @LannynynyMTG makes me smile so much. Couldn't have been happier being destroyed by one of my best friends @d_tao in the final of the Saturday tournament. Llanowar Wastes mirror pic.twitter.com/IrP1FqClGx

— Michael Flores (@fivewithflores) June 4, 2023

We finished 1-2 at the Saturday tournament at LobsterCon; with him taking it all with, you guessed it, Full English Breakfast.

What you might not know is that in addition to beating me in the Finals, DTao beat me in the first round as well!

But this time I was not terrible The Rock. I was good Premodern Burn!

Full English Breakfast, in the abstract, is a very good matchup for Burn. FEB either has to untap with a 1/1 in play or have enough mana to play out a Volrath's Shapeshifter with multiple for Survival of the Fittest activations.

The former is incredibly vulnerable to Burn's Gear Two - Grim Lavamancer, whatever burn cards, and especially Lava Dart after sideboarding - and the latter requires the filthy combo player to have 5+ nonbasic lands in play all at the same time.

Have you read Price of Progress?

David is one of my best friends but I sure didn't treat him that way in this one. Game 2 especially I drew two PoPs and cast them, mercilessly.

2-2

Round Five: Roland Chang with Mono-Red Burn

Roland is of course a former Vintage and Legacy World Champion (in different years); and another one of the TaoHaus meetup crew that was initially so formative to my Premodern experience. It looked like the winner of our match was going to squeak, somehow, into Top 8.

This one was stupidly close.

In Game 1 I drew one of the bad cards to Roland's zero. Jackal Pup and Sulfuric Vortex are both really bad in the mirror. My Vortex killed me a turn before it would have killed Roland.

Game 2 and Game 3 were both just as close. In Game 3, Roland initiated a stack and I responded by killing him. At some point he was going to have to act in order to get me low enough to finish the job; and by the same token I was terrified of initiating for fear of his having a Fireblast.

I don't know what to say other than it was a squeaker.

Heroes had made Top 8... But were up against Cam Fulton again in the Quarterfinals.

Top 8: Cam Fulton with Enchantress

Unlike everyone else who drew, Cam played for top seed, and the option to go first throughout the Top 8. He was rewarded with the easiest matchup on earth: Yours Truly.

"You better not sneak in with two losses only to beat me in the Round of Eight again," Cam joked. He is automatic at $1ks... Third at Sacred Torch, Top 8 at Bearded Dragon, now first seed at the volleyball court.

We split the first two.

I had first turn Jackal Pup all three games, but Cam always had Elephant Grass or Parallax Wave, so I had yet to do Jackal Pup damage before the middle of Game 3.

I paid my two for Elephant Grass and in came Puppy.

Cam had Argothian Enchantress back, and I knew he had Worship on top of his deck. I thought I was just dead. ...

But then I understood his dilemma.

I had four lands and four cards in hand. It was entirely possible if the Pup hit - putting him to six - he'd be dead before he could land Worship. There was no shortage of combinations that would do it. Two Lightning Bolts... A Shock and a Fireblast...

"Block."

Cam was at eight, but now had to try to upkeep a Solitary Confinement with only one remaining Enchantress effect.

He navigated this long enough to get a Sphere of Law... Normally a pretty good spoiler! But my Ball Lightning was able to deal a little overload. Finally Barbarian Ring - non-Red damage that it is - finished the game through the Sphere.

Somehow, unbelievably, I had gotten past my nemesis in one of the toughest matchups in the room.

Top 4: Lanny Huang with GAT

I wish I could take credit.

Lanny himself taught me how to win this matchup.

He got Game 1 with a singleton main-deck Armageddon that I knew he had.

"My mistake," I concluded, "was beating you in that meetup last month."

Back in November or December, Lanny had been locked by my Cursed Scroll and realized he needed some measure of mana control in order to not auto-lose to the commonly played artifact. Had I not beaten him back then, he might never have swapped out the one Counterspell and gotten me in this match when it finally mattered.

I proved victorious in Game 2 with a flurry of 1-drops; but in Game 3 only because Lanny mulled to five. It was still an incredibly close one, also nearly decided by Armageddon.

Lanny is one of the greatest theorists in all of Magic; not just Premodern. I feel privileged I get to talk to him about this thing I love on the reg. Some people are geniuses but can't communicate their ideas, or help others how to get better. As much as I've written about Modern (and Premodern) Burn at this point - Gears included - I doubt I'll ever be able to teach anyone how to play properly, except maybe in person.

When I was coaching Rebell on Modern Burn she beat herself up for playing a Lava Spike on turn one.

Lanny cut through all of it in a way I never could have. "Lava Spike is unplayable in every other context. It was not a good Limited card. It was never played in Standard. Strangely it is good in this one deck ever, which is not even a combo deck. You're right: It's wrong to play Lava Spike on turn one and you shouldn't have done it... But the real question is how you would ever have known that? No one starts off knowing that. It's just not intuitive."

When I was playing for Top 8 against Roland, I spent my Lava Darts as soon as I drew them. Of course you'll Dart any creature you can, but I cast a Dart to the head just because I had mana free.

A Lava Dart in the graveyard - even if spent as a frivolous point to the opponent - is like an insurance policy. You get to do whatever you want once Lava Dart is in the graveyard, because no matter what else, you now have almost unconditional Ball Lightning defense.

"Dart... you," isn't the obvious right sequence unless you've played a lot of Burn mirrors. A one mana to one damage conversion - while essentially discarding a card - is bad Magic by every measuring stick, including The Philosophy of Fire. There is no reason anyone would know this is the right thing to do, other than they spent 200 hours one year playing Extended RDW variations against themselves on Apprentice. A card like Ball Lightning (or Blistering Firecat, back in the day) is weird because it uses all your mana and you have a low expectation of ever hitting with one.

... But if you do? Sparks fly!

So Ball Lightning becomes the One Winged Angel of the Burn mirror. Angle for it. Don't get hit by it. Other things matter, but none so much as the Ball Lightning sub-game. As a result? You know to point a Lava Dart to the face just to get it out of your hand. This is the kind of play routine that it would never occur for me to tell anyone, other than I actually did it an hour earlier and it seemed like the kind of thing Lanny would be good at identifying that I'm oblivious of.

I'd never tell him this myself, and would never admit it to him, but when it comes to Premodern at least, Lanny is both the better theoretician and the better teacher.

That's one of the reasons I work so hard to beat him. It's bad enough he won PSS.

Finals: Greg Fenton with Squirrel Opposition

This one was kind of an anticlimax.

In Game 1, Greg gambled on a one lander with multiple Llanowar Elves. Me? I drew the main-deck Lava Dart.

He eventually drew a second land, but I was already trampling over with Ball Lightnings at that point.

In classic Masques Block Rebels fashion, after winning Game 1 with a particular card, I sided out Ball Lightning and even Incinerate for all one-mana plays... Lava Darts and my five Blasts.

Greg mulled to five, but kind of spoiled my optimal draw fun by opening on Hidden Gibbons.

So, I just swung with my Grim Lavamancer a few times and tried to ignore his Birds of Paradise.

At some point I drew an Urza's Bauble. Greg only had two cards in hand at that point. I activated the Bauble, which revealed to me Opposition I had no reason to be scared of.

I counted my mana, looked at my graveyard, and tallied my full grip. Exactly twenty.

Well, Greg's mystery other card was a Hydroblast, which traded with my Fireblast and suddenly put Our Hero waaaaay behind. Worse, I turned on the Gibbons while leaving the Birds alive!

He was only on four... But Survival of the Fittest bought him Spike Feeder. It was tense for a second, but I was able to finish him off with double Lava Dart flashback in response to his gaining life.

Huge props to Greg for taking an unexpected deck to the Finals!

Greg beat both Sacred Torch Champion Mike Harris and the usually unflappable Dave Kaplan in the Top 8; plus Lanny in the Swiss! Mike and Dave, notably, were the only 12/12 players in the entire tournament; as I said earlier, both 12/12 mages were Top 8. Welcome to Greg; I hope to see him shake up some more meta soon.

Anyway, that was the story of how I started 0-2 but won a $1,000 Premodern tournament with my favorite deck of all time. The next time I'm in the bottom half of a Top 8 and whining about being on the draw, I'm going to look back at this tournament... And try to appreciate all the improbable luck I needed to even have had a chance.

LOVE

MIKE