If you missed them, here are the preceding Part 1 and the following Part 3 of this series

Last week, I talked about the dedication that goes into making a run at the Pro Tour, this week I want to talk about logistics and preparation.

There are three major ways to qualify for the Pro Tour – Physical PTQs, Online PTQs and Grand Prix. http://www.wizards.com/Magic/tcg/events.aspx?x=mtgcom/events/protour is Wizard’s site dedicated to the Pro Tour, and under each PT it will list the PTQs that feed it. This is your bible. Once the list comes out, generally a month or so before the PTQ season, you need to begin organizing your PTQ calendar. Ideally you have a playgroup of some kind, and you can figure out who is available each weekend, and start making plans for which tournaments you will hit up that season – both live and online.

When there are two PTQs on the same day within driving distance, ask yourself a few questions:

How strong will the competition be at each PTQ?

About how big will each PTQ be?

Which PTQ is going to be run better?

From these, you can decide which one you’d rather attend. In general, the strength of the competition and size should be your primary concerns. If you have the option of a PTQ with 250 people and a lot of ringers, or one with 100 people and only one or two, you will have a much better chance at qualifying at the latter. You shouldn’t write off the last question, though. A well run PTQ might not seem like much until you’ve been to one that has not been run well. The round times take longer, the judge staff is less experienced, the location is small and cramped, and your overall experience is going to be much worse.

Going to a PTQ alone is not great. If you have any kind of long drive, it means that you will be spending a huge amount of time behind the wheel. And let’s face it, driving a few hours, going 0-2 and driving a few more hours home will make for just about the worst day imaginable. A loss in the top8 is harder when you are exhausted and need to drive home that night. Even if you win, you won’t have anyone to celebrate with. A good crew can trade off driving responsibilities, provide extra time of preparation in the car with conversation, make lunch runs if someone is out of the tournament, and generally provide you the support you need to get all the way through a ten or eleven round tournament.

Also, work out gas arrangements before you leave. Nothing is worse than trying to get money out of people after you get back. “I’ll hit you up next time I see you,” generally translates as - “I’m probably never going to pay my $15 share of the ride. But thanks for driving.”

The Morning Drive or the Hotel Room – When a PTQ is within an hour, there isn’t much of a question - you drive the morning of. When it is six hours away, you almost always need to get a hotel room. But what if it is in the three hour range? As I mentioned last week, almost all of my PTQs are about three hours away, so this comes up a lot. I’ll talk about stamina and alertness next week, but suffice it to say, a good nights sleep is a huge advantage in the later rounds of a PTQ. If you get to know the regulars in you region, it’s possible that you can save money and find a couch or three to crash on.

I personally prefer the morning drive, but that’s because I end up spending three hours talking about Magic the morning before the PTQ and getting pumped up. I’m also good at budgeting my mental energy throughout the day, and can play ten rounds without my brain turning to spaghetti, but that is another skill that took years to hone. Driving the morning of is better for me than a hotel, but that’s just my personal preference. Figure out what works best for you and what you can work into your schedule.

There are people who believe that if they can just grind out a few PTQ top8s, they will qualify on rating. You might as well go hunting Bigfoot. You need around a 2075 total to feel comfortable sitting on your rating for a slot to a PT. The average rating of someone at a PTQ is closer to the 1700-1800 range. That means by the time you hit 2000, you will be gaining about six points per win, losing twenty-six per loss, and losing about nine per draw. Unless you happen to play a few high ranked players, a 7-1-1 PTQ performance can turn into a gain of ten points – and it only gets worse the higher up you go. If you have something close to a 2000, the only way to break through to a qualifiable rating is to top32 a Grand Prix. There, your day 2 opponents will have ratings closer to 2000 on average, and the number of points on the line per match is much higher.

So, speaking of Grand Prix, they are next on the list. In my experience, it is probably easier to qualify through a Grand Prix than to win a PTQ. While the caliber of player is higher, so are the number of slots. You get a 16 instead of 1, as well as the advantage of having a way to push your rating over the edge. You can earn three to four losses in a Grand Prix and still hit top 16 – where a PTQ requires either zero or one.

Grand Prix are also the highest level of competition you will find outside of the Pro Tour. There is more than a little you can learn through playing, or just watching the Pros play. If you aren’t in the event anymore, take some time to watch the top tables. Stand behind a pro that you respect, and look at his hand. Think about how you would play the match, and see what he does differently. This can give you some amazing insights into things you aren’t doing, or could be doing better.

The largest downside is that a Grand Prix qualification doesn’t come with a plane ticket. If the PT is in Japan and you absolutely can’t go without a ticket, then this may not work. A top8 performance should give you enough money to buy your own way, but top16 will ‘only’ get you $500. That is enough for a plane ticket on your own continent, but don’t expect to cross and ocean with it.

Preparation

Now that you have a crew to go with, and a calendar telling you when and where you are going, it’s time to get ready.

This is where the two hours of practice per hour of the car comes up. If you know who you are playing with, you can divide up some of the preparation a bit. You are going to want to read a lot of articles. I lean heavily on preferring the ‘teach a man to fish’ type of articles, but I understand that there are a lot of fishmongers out there, and if I know what they are selling, I’ll know what I can expect to see. For a constructed PTQ season, you need to have at least one person who can keep up on all of the new decks floating around and trying to at least proxy up the better ones. You need someone who can learn all of the sideboarding strategies in and out, and conceptualize how to win matchups rather than just mimic what they’ve read. You need someone who can learn how to play the top tier deck(s) as well as possible, and act as the baseline for any new deck that you want to play, and someone who is willing to take risks and try out new things.

Having people with different roles will let you get the most out of your time not physically playing cards. Someone who can come to your playtesting every week with the latest tech from Magic Online or Japan (where almost all the wacky decks come out of ) will let you focus on other things and still reap the rewards. Someone who can have the latest tech for all of the main decks will keep you ahead of people who are only reading articles – which tend to have last weeks decks. Even if you all end up playing Jund, you will have a better idea of what people are going to show up with, and how to play against every deck.

The less time you have to prepare each week, the more important it is to stick with one deck throughout the PTQ season. Unless there is one deck that emerges half-way through the season that is heads and shoulders above the rest (I.e., Ichorid in extended in 2006), you will generally do better being very comfortable with one deck and learning every in and out of it than skimming through the top decks trying to find the right one for the tournament each week. That doesn’t mean you should only test that deck, though. Even a dozen games with another deck will give you a good feel for it, and help you put yourself into your opponent’s shoes during the game. You need to know what their outs are, and how to play their deck.

When the format is limited, you will want to draft a lot. Read all of the ‘Drafting with’ articles, but don’t mindlessly mimic pick orders. Try and get into the head of the pro who is drafting, and see what they see about the format. Try out new decks and niche strategies when you are playing with your friends – it’s a lot better than trying to decide if the mill strategy will work in the middle of pack 2 of a top8 draft.

Also, practice sealed. This is something that people undervalue. Sealed deck is not the same as draft. I’ll go more into this when we get closer to the Scar’s PTQ season, but there is a metagame to sealed deck. Certain colors and strategies tend to just emerge as superior. In Zendikar sealed, it was aggro. Once you’ve figured out the sealed deck format, you get a week or two to build your decks better than your opponents and have an advantage. Once they’ve figured it out, then you can metagame it. If you watched the top tables of the Zendikar sealed PTQs, it was almost all R/B aggro. That means that you can start maindecking cards that are good against that strategy. While I’d always want to play R/B, if it wasn’t there, I’d build a deck that had a good game against it. Also keep in mind that you are playing for top8, not to go 5-2. At a 200 person PTQ, the quality of the sealed decks in the last few rounds is going to be very high. Four bomb rare high. Build a deck that has a good strategy against decks with better cards. You don’t want to play the long game against a deck that has multiple game winning spells unless you can counter or nullify them.

Get your friends together, get a few sealed pools, and play a few games of sealed. Then give the pools to someone else, and see how they would have built it. Play a few more games. Try out new things, decide what the best strategies are for your sealed deck in terms of power and consistency, and find the cards that are better in sealed than draft, or vice versa. Adjust your mental ‘pick order’ from the more common draft settings, to what a sealed deck should look like.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas of how to approach a PTQ before the tournament even starts. Next week I’ll go over everything you’ve ever wanted to know about an actual PTQ and more.

If you missed them, here are the preceding Part 1 and the following Part 3 of this series