Something Bigger – Captain’s Log from Team NRG Pro Tour Aetherdrift by Theo Jung

Something Bigger – Captain’s Log from Team NRG Pro Tour Aetherdrift.

If you’re not already read the article “The Start of Something: 1st Place at #NRGChamps” check that out as well.

Introduction:

I found myself in a unique situation for Pro Tour Aetherdrift testing team wise. Despite having been on team ChannelFireball et al. for the last four events and being very happy with my experiences, my close friends Nam Dang, Eli Loveman, Maxx Kominowski, Dominick Paolercio, and Connor Mullaly were all qualified for this PT. I spent years grinding events on Magic Online or playing on the NRG circuit with them and preparing for a PT with the boys seemed like the dream. Despite all the success and improvement I saw working alongside team CFB, I could not pass up this opportunity. As PT Chicago was so close to the set’s release, I knew that the six of us could not make an effective team just by ourselves. As such, we merged with team Scrapheap, a team who broke it at the Pioneer Regional Championships last year at DC by creating GW Company and qualifying a staggering 7 people for this Pro Tour. We were very lucky to join forces with Quinn Tonole, Zevin Faust, Jacob Milchman, Zhao Li, and Joseph Puglisi. We also picked up some excellent free agents in Corey Burkhart, Jonathan Hobbs, Travis Benedict, and Ian Robb to round out our team. 

Our team needed clearly laid out communication norms and defined meeting schedules. It was a large team with two distinct groups and a couple free agents, so ensuring that we worked as a cohesive team instead of splintering off into various subgroups based on our previous affiliations was important. We had weekly team meetings for a month leading up to the PT discussing which brews were good candidates, what to test in Cockatrice sessions for that coming week, and assigning people to explore various decks. Dividing the testing process into manageable chunks and getting a head start before the set’s release on Magic Online brought much needed organization to the team. A template for post-matchup writeups established communication standards and ensured that people were not just playing a bunch of games that the rest of us did not learn from. A fortunate thing I quickly realized was that the number of games played would not be a problem for us. A lot of our group was used to putting in tons of time on Magic Online, and I had no problem getting 1v1 matches with anyone no matter the time of day. This was the first Pro Tour for a decent chunk of our team and we were willing to make up for the lack of experience with practice. 

Three weeks before the event at NRG Chicagoland, I talked to Norman (the owner of NRG), about our team and that a lot of people competing on his series were a part of it. He agreed to generously sponsor our team. And with that, we became Team Nerd Rage Gaming. With a testing house two blocks away from my apartment, ambitious teammates, and an excellent sponsor, I was feeling great about our chances.

Testing Process – Constructed

The first step in the testing process is to figure out the terms of engagement for the format. Thankfully, in the case of this PT, the terms of engagement were simple. Gruul and Pixie were going to be the most popular decks. Figuring out whether a prospective choice was viable was as easy as playing against these two and seeing if it showed merit against one or the other. If the matchup against one or the other seemed horrible, eliminating that deck was an easy choice. If a deck crushed either Gruul or Pixie, it became an interesting candidate. 

As one would expect, most decks we tried with new cards did not really pan out. Gruul and Pixie both are incredibly punishing when you stumble and their relevant spells cost half as much compared to lots of other decks. Insidious Roots, despite being very powerful, was too inconsistent and did nothing when it didn’t find its namesake card. Pirates with Maurading Mako and Scrounging Skyray was too slow to make its creatures big. The Ketramose decks we tried- Oculus and controlling midrange shells with Deadly Cover-Up, were prone to getting run over when it took a turn off to play its namesake card. GW with Brightglass Gearhulk did not really play any good cards aside from Llanowar Elves and Gearhulk. GB Beans was one of two brews that showed some promise. More on that one later. 

After the initial exploratory period, we turned our attention to the two bounce decks- Esper Pixie and UB Bounce. It became clear that if you were to register one of them, it should be Esper Pixie. UB bounce lacked the good proactive draws you needed in this format. Gruul, which I thought would be a good matchup for UB because of its smooth 2-color manabase, turned out to be surprisingly difficult. If there was one thing we learned in this Standard, it is that black midrange decks have a hard time beating Gruul when it takes a primarily reactive role. Closing out games before Gruul could leverage its big cards like Innkeeper’s Talent/Questing Druid or start kicking Manifold Mouse was an important part of the matchup, and a job that the white cards were well equipped to do. UB Bounce being somewhat anemic was an issue against Domain as well, where Esper Pixie at least had the out g1 of running them over with a quick Scavenger draw. Even if some of our team liked it, I personally dismissed Esper Pixie as an option because I could not convince myself that I would have any edge on the field with it. Our team did not make significant innovations to Pixie. Maindeck No More Lies was our only deviation from stock after week one and the field caught onto this fairly quickly. I think to register the most popular stock deck at a PT, you have to be convinced it is much better than what the rest of the field is bringing. You are essentially saying that you are a favorite to win against people on testing teams that have played hundreds of games against your deck and have formulated gameplans through those many hours of practice. There were times where it was correct to register the most popular deck, like Nadu for PT MH3 or Izzet Phoenix for PT MKM, but in order to justify bringing Pixie to this tournament, I felt like you needed significant innovations or have incredible proficiency in playing the deck. And I had neither. 

On Sunday night before the event, we noticed that Cut Down was a card that was being played in very small numbers and rarely in peoples’ maindecks. UB Midrange has largely left from the format and been replaced by bounce decks. Mono Red seemed like an excellent option to exploit metagame trends such as the lack of one mana removal spells in Bounce, the uptick in domain, and the uptick in midrange-y cards in Gruul such as Pawpatch Recruit and Innkeeper’s Talent. 

I wrote a couple months ago in my NRG Champs report about how Innkeeper’s Talent was a great card in standard, but a lot has changed since then. Dimir Midrange was where Innkeeper’s Talent was at its best, and has been entirely replaced by Esper Pixie and Dimir Bounce as the midrange decks of choice. The latter is much more aggressive, and taking turn 2 off to play Innkeeper’s Talent, especially on the draw, proved to be game losing against Pixie a lot of the time. It was also a card that was poor in the red mirror, which we expected a lot of. Talent still had its moments, like being one of your best cards against Domain. However, I found the correct number of talent to be around 2, and Questing Druid/Pawpatch Recruit both felt fairly poor. I’m a believer that unless you can confidently slam 4 copies of one or more of the green cards in your Gruul deck, you should just play Mono Red.

Abandoning green came with its fair share of rewards. The increase of the number of 1 drops from 8 to 12 meant that you got to have more fast starts that most decks in the format tend to struggle with. Playing a better manabase was also a large appeal. People vastly overstate how free the green splash is in Gruul. Having to play 4 Karplusan Forests in a format where red aggro and Esper Pixie are the most popular decks is a significant cost. Instead, you get to play 4 Rockface Village and 3 Soulstone Sanctuary to mitigate flood, an issue that Gruul has often due to having less utility lands to meet its mana requirements.Sunspine Lynx was a card we felt like was a great sideboard option for this tournament. Against Pixie, it was a 4 toughness creature that did not die to Nowhere to Run and often dealt anywhere between 3-5+ damage. The card is often too painful for Gruul to play in high numbers, but with 15 mountains you rarely take more than 2 damage with Lynx as Mono Red.  It being one of your best cards against Domain helped its case. Another thing that we found was that Lightning Strike felt like a good card in this format. Removing creatures with the third point of toughness such as fear of isolation, optimistic scavenger (often), and screaming nemesis felt important. Having 8 pieces of removal against Pixie and Gruul meant you were minimizing game 1s where you would get run over on the draw.Additionally, we expected the number of high toughness black threats such as Preacher of the Schism and Sheoldred the Apocalypse to be at an all time low. In this tournament, Lightning Strike felt pretty close to Terminate that you could also aim at your opponent. We settled on the following list, which is exactly 15 cards off Quinn’s worlds list from a couple months ago.  

Main	Sideboard
4 Burst Lightning 4 Emberheart Challenger  4 Heartfire Hero 4 Hired Claw 4 Lightning Strike 4 Manifold Mouse 4 Monastery Swiftspear 4 Monstrous Rage 15 Mountain 4 Rockface Village 4 Screaming Nemesis 3 Soulstone Sanctuary 2 Witchstalker Frenzy	2 Ghost Vacuum 4 Lithomantic Barrage 4 Sunspine Lynx 3 Torch the Tower 2 Witchstalker Frenzy

I felt confident in this choice. Mono Red could very realistically have an edge on the field if our predicted metagame of lots of Pixie, Gruul, and Domain became a reality. Even if we missed the mark, it would not be by much. At the end of the day, we were still registering a red deck with Emberheart Challenger, Manifold Mouse, and Heartfire Hero. You can see the sideboard plans that our team made before the event here. Ian Robb (@Ian__Robb on Twitter) has a sideboard guide on Metafy with his updates after the Pro Tour as well. I did not particularly like our Jeskai Oculus plan, but I am unsure how I would update my sideboarding either. Going forward, I would like to cut the fourth Lithomantic Barrage for a Torch the Tower, as Litho is not very good against Jeskai Oculus. 

Another section of the team ended up registering GB Beanstalk, which I also felt was a solid choice. I did not have a huge hand in working on the deck but the main issue with the deck was that it had a poor Gruul matchup, but it was incredibly good against Esper Pixie. On Tuesday night, Joseph found Souls of the Lost, which served as an effective roadblock against Gruul and in the words of some members of our team “flipped the matchup”. This was enough for four people in our group to register GB Beanstalk

Main	Sideboard
4 Up the Beanstalk 4 Swamp 4 Huskburster Swarm 1 Forest 4 Hollow Marauder 2 Chitin Gravestalker 4 Overwhelming Remorse 4 Overlord of the Balemurk 4 Souls of the Lost 4 Blooming Marsh 3 Llanowar Wastes 4 Underground Mortuary 4 Wastewood Verge 4 Molt Tender 4 Cenote Scout 4 Gnawing Vermin 2 Harvester of Misery	3 Terror Tide 1 Cut Down 1 Harvester of Misery 2 Obstinate Baloth 4 Scrapshooter 1 Starving Revenant 1 Duress 2 Haywire Mite

In the end, here are the decks we registered: 

7 Mono Red- Me, Ian, Eli, Nam, Travis, Quinn, Connor

4 GB Beans- Zevin, Jacob, Joseph, Zhao

3 Esper Pixie- Dom, Corey, Maxx

1 Gruul Aggro- Jonathan

Testing process- Limited

After day one of playing Aetherdrift, it became clear that most games were incredibly slow. This was a nice change of pace from limited formats from the past year, which have largely been on the fast side. The aggressive decks were largely vehicle or mount centric, which was not a favorable thing in this format. The exception to this was RB, which was an aggro deck I liked drafting a fair bit. The core premise of being a vehicle/mount-centric aggro deck is a poor one, as you are spending 2 pieces of material to generate a single attacker- usually a bad deal unless that single attacker is very good. The most recent format with mounts was OTJ, where the majority of green and white mounts were powerful enough that they were acceptable when not saddled and were very good when you did. In this format however, most mounts were only okay when crewed and quite bad if you didn’t. Most vehicles were rarely worth crewing to attack with either. Green was undeniably the best color, and we had Run Over as the standout common over the rest.

We logged a total of 200+ drafts in-house and online, and I personally had 36 before the event. Our friend Brian Zilles was a huge help in the limited portion. Despite not being qualified for the actual PT, Brian offered to come early and participate in the testing house and I could not have been happier about that. He is one of the best limited players I know and had lots of information to add about how to draft good versions of certain archetypes like UW that I was initially averse to. After doing 9 in-house drafts at the testing house over 4 days, we had a 5-hour limited meeting. I’ll link the general card rankings we arrived at for each color pair here for people interested in checking it out. 

The Pro Tour:

The Thursday before PTs, I have a rule to play zero games of Magic. When we do the testing house, we are playing constantly for 10+ hours during that week, and there is no need to fill that Thursday with practice. I’d rather just get some rest and trust that the preparation I’ve already done is enough. After checking out of the AirBnB, most of the team went to the NRG store to pick up apparel, have a tour, and grab lunch at Portillo’s. Then, we went to the players party at 5, where I chatted with friends, had dinner, then left early with Eli Kassis and Alex Friedrichsen to Bally’s Casino briefly before returning home to a good night’s sleep with some change in my pocket. 

Draft 1: 

I start the draft by picking an Explosive Getaway over Run Over, which I am not sure was right. Getaway is not the best wrath, it is suspect to consider it one in the first place. But if you can draft around it in a deck like UW/UR, the card becomes very powerful. I then pick Stock Up second over Hazard of the Dunes, then pick up a Ride’s End over another Run Over. In pick 4, I pick up a Run Over over no good cards, but a pick 6 Guidelight Pathmaker solidifies my lane in UWr. I even pick up a Riverchurn Monument fourth in pack 2, which I think might be one of the better rares in this set and certainly better than every uncommon. I ended up with a fine but not great deck, having to play some bad filler. UW did not feel not as open as I hoped even after pick 6 Pathmaker and entertaining the idea of a black splash at the end of pack 2 I did not end up playing meant that I ended up with a bit less solid filler than I hoped for. 

I ended up going 1-2, with my losses being to GR and UR. The Riverchurn Monument did not perform as hoped, as it was the target of Broken wings and a Skycrash in my R1 and R3 losses respectively. I beat a GWu deck in round 2 which looked decent but my pile of 3 and 4 toughness blockers lined up favorably into their smaller creatures. Ride’s End, Gallant Strike, and Outpace Oblivion did a good job taking care of their bigger stuff to buy enough time for Riverchurn Monument to do its job. 

Constructed Day 1: 

My constructed rounds went as such: 

R4: Rakdos Sacrifice- LL
R5: Gruul- WW
R6: Esper Pixie- WLW
R7: Gruul- WW
R8: UB Demons- WW

I rallied to a respectable 5-3 after starting 1-3, after winning the die roll in all but one of my rounds and casting 6 copies of Screaming Nemesis compared to my opponents’ zero in the 2 red mirrors. I also mulliganed maybe once in those 5 rounds. Thanks to a sun run in constructed, I went to dinner with team NRG in good spirits. We went to a Korean barbecue place called Daebak, and it was maybe the worst KBBQ experience I’ve ever had. It was an all you can eat where the servers were inattentive, the portions they were bringing each time were tiny, and the meat itself was not very good. I heavily recommend avoiding this place if you don’t want drinks to be the best part of your meal. Despite the disappointing food and service, it was a fun dinner in good company. The team had day two and PTQs to play, so we called it an early night. 

Draft 2: 

I open a Cryptcaller Chariot in the first pack and take it over Skyseeker Serpent as the only other consideration. Our team was fairly high on the cycling payoffs and were willing to take them p1p1 as good buildarounds. I follow it up with a Maurading Mako from a weak pack into Lightning Strike, then Wreckage Wickerfolk. I pick up an Intimidation Tactics around pick 7 or 8 and settle into RB. Pack 2 was very rocky, getting virtually no good cards after first picking Endrider Spikespitter in my first pack. Pack 3 was more of the same but I picked up a Crash and Burn and another Lightning Strike in the first few picks. I pass Mu Yanling in pick 3 and regret not just being UR and just splashing the Cryptcaller CHariot. The end result was one of the worst decks I have ever drafted at a PT.

I lose round 9 to Chris Larsen on UG where he plays a bunch of big butts, including the 0/8 into my meagerly sized creatures and finishes me off with two Aether Siphons. In round 10, beat a small BW deck after 3 close games, including losing game 2 where my opponent mulled to 5. An unanswered Dracosaur Auxiliary was enough to cross the finish line in game 3. In round 11, I get paired into Jesse Hampton. During PT OTJ, he finessed me pretty hard in the draft portion when we played so I had to get him back. I draw the top end of my range by going Cryptcaller Chariot into Thunderhead Gunner both games and easily steamroll him. I even missed two speed triggers in the process. Ending this draft with a 2-1 record was quite the feat, and felt pretty good going into constructed. A 9-7 would lock me for the third PT of this year, and I only had to manage a 2-3 record in order to achieve that. 

Constructed Day 2: 

R12: Domain- WW
R13: Mirror(Teammate Ian Robb)  LWL
R14: Gruul- LWW
R15: Gruul- LL
R16: Jeskai Oculus- WW

I finished 10-6, which seems to be the standard for me these days. I was very glad to pick up the 9th with and lock myself for the third PT of this year. It also puts me in a decent position to make a run for the World Championships off AMPs. Nam had a much more exciting 10-6 after going 9-4, losing two in a row then narrowly winning the last one to requalify for the next PT. Sadly Eli lost his win and in for the requalification. Zevin made top 8 earlier in the day, and Ian ended up running the tables and finishing 12-4. Given the amount of people at that record and only two slots, we thought he was dead for top 8 but 3 PTs and worlds was a great result for your first PT. Imagine how shocked we were during the top 8 announcement when Riley Knight said “And in eighth from the united states… Ian Robb”. We all cheered like crazy. We thought he would be a lock for 9th or 10th, and somehow his breakers improved enough for a .4% jump over the 9th place finisher. It was truly surreal to see two members of our team make top 8. After they took all the top 8 pictures and such.a bunch of us went to dinner at a Cuban place that Maxx recommended. Of course, the first round of drinks was on Ian. 

Sadly, both Ian and Zevin ended up losing their quarterfinals on Sunday. Ian flooded out in a good matchup against Matt Nass, and Zevin ended up bricking on creatures off his mills against Gruul in game 5.I was very proud of our teammates for crushing it this hard at their first Pro Tour. We put a lot of work into preparing for this PT, and it was great to show it with great results on the biggest stage. After some team drafts, the members of team NRG who did not have a flight to catch and Zevin’s parents went to dinner at Avec to end the weekend, one of my favorite restaurants in Chicago. Their bacon-wrapped chorizo dates are among my favorite things to eat. 

Postmortem: 

Our main area of strength of this tournament was in our constructed preparation. We had two good candidate decks and had good plans against the most popular matchups. However, there were two significant mistakes we made. The first was not identifying Domain as a good candidate. When we first tried Domain, the stock lists that most people were playing online were horrible. I could not cast spells on time, my sideboard was seemingly 15 random cards, and Elspeth’s Smite was maybe the worst removal spell I’ve ever put into a constructed deck. It felt like I would lose every game from some variation of being too slow, being color screwed, or half my lands coming into play tapped. As such, we dismissed Domain as a bad deck, but the reality was that it was a good deck with consistency issues. Instead of considering the possibility of “what if this deck actually could do all this powerful stuff on time?”, we quickly dismissed it as an option due to its poor performance. Other teams, most notably Team CFB, correctly identified this. They fixed the manabase by cutting Cavern of Souls and playing 4 Ride’s End as the removal spell of choice. Their efforts were greatly rewarded, as Matt Nass was crowned champion at the end of the weekend.

Another regret I had was not pushing the three teammates who ended up playing Esper Pixie to not register the deck. Looking back, Esper Pixie was the kind of best deck that one should have avoided at the Pro Tour. A good chunk of the team identified this, but we did not have a meeting close to the event where we could come to a collective understanding on how we felt about the deck. If we scheduled a Monday or Tuesday night meeting before deck submission, I think we could have eliminated Pixie as a candidate. 

We also did not do too great in limited. Despite Zevin going 6-0 in draft, the team collectively underperformed with a 48% limited winrate. Part of this was that many of our teammates were playing their first PT, so outperforming PT veterans with years of high level draft experience under their belt was a tall task. However, I think I could have better equipped ourselves with a better chance of success. The other day, I listened to Eduardo Sajgalik (@Walaoumpa) discuss Worldly Counsel’s limited preparation on Twitch. Worldly Counsel is a team that consistently crushes the draft portion of every Pro Tour, frequently posting 60%+ winrates despite taking lots of first-time PT players. They consistently equip their members with the tools to succeed in high-level drafts and I highly recommend listening to the recording here. There is a lot to digest from that stream, but a big takeaway was the importance of having a PT-specific draft strategy. This was something our team needed. We did a great job of identifying what to prioritize in every lane and teaching everyone how all the archetypes come together and their general strength in a vacuum, but we did not have a coherent strategy on how to approach the format. We ranked the cards too in-line with our arbitrary measures of goodness, failing to consider that draft has a metagame and we should have exploited peoples’ tendencies to fight over green by being much more willing to draft the non-green, non-Boros archetypes than we were. All this may sound very critical, but I think the fact that we made so many mistakes in our preparation and still put two people into top 8 is a very hopeful fact. It means that if we learn from this and improve our process, better results are yet to come. 

Before this PT, my motivation in regards to Magic since the start of 2025 was pretty low. I do not particularly care for this Standard, and playing a heinous Modern format for RC Portland hampered a lot of enjoyment that I derived from the game. But playing a great draft format, renting a testing house with the boys, and watching the successes of new and old friends at the PT reminded me why I continue to play Magic. Special thanks to Brian Zilles for helping test, Norm and Nerd Rage Gaming for sponsoring us, and Team NRG for putting their trust in me as their captain. I do not know what form team NRG will take in the future. Only five of the original fifteen are qualified for the next PT, but I am hopeful for my friends’ performances at RC Charlotte. PT Final Fantasy is the last PT before I start my MBA in the fall, and I am ready to give that one everything I have. 

Thanks for reading.

Theo