I can still remember the pain in the heel of my hand. Light, but throbbing. The only light in the cavernous hallway spilled out from the near-empty event hall, where tournament staff waited for eight players to finish their matches in the final tournament of the year. I paced up and down the still escalators. Keep moving… try not to focus on what was happening in that room….
At the start of the day in Milwaukee, my friends and I knew I would probably need to Top 8 the event to qualify for the 2020-2021 NRG Championship. I came up just short, not able to intentionally draw the final round of swiss and losing both postboard games in what may have been my worst matchup, Four-Color Control into my BW Hammer. It turned out that our prediction was wrong: once the Top 8 started, a friend let me know that as of now, I was in. All I had to do was fade Dom Paolercio, who was undefeated in the tournament, making the finals. Dom was somebody I had become friends with after a few months of traveling to tournaments together, and he played a masterful quarter and semifinal match to make the finals and take the last spot of the championship. On my last walk down the escalator, I pounded my fist against the railing, frustrated and angry with myself that I had come up short. One more match win, in any of the six tournaments NRG had held that season, and I would have been in.
I walked into the stark light of the event hall and yelled to Dom. “Hey! You going to buy a shelf?” before giving him a hug in congratulations for making the finals and qualifying. (As I write this a year later, I’m in a Discord call with Dom after he beat me in an MTGO match, and he’s tilting off that he still doesn’t have a trophy to put on a shelf at home). Max Kahn and Mat Bimonte, who work to put on the NRG tournaments, both gave me a hug in consolation. I told both of them that I wasn’t going to miss the following year: I would do whatever it took to be among the 16 playing in the championship.
And now, 12 months later, I’ve stayed true to my word. I played in 11 of NRG’s 12 tournament weekends. I drove to 7 cities across the Midwest and flew to an eighth, driving 4,740 total miles with an average trip of 3 hours and 50 minutes. I played 164 matches across those 22 tournaments, winning 115 and losing 49 of them. I won 67% of my matches in Legacy, 69% in Modern, 71% in Pioneer (my favorite format), and teamed with the right folks to achieve a 75% win rate in team events. I Top 8’d four of these tournaments (winning 70% of my elimination round matches!) and made countless mistakes. I achieved some of my goals for the year: I did qualify for championships, and I won a trophy. But I also fell short: I didn’t qualify for the Pro Tour, and I didn’t accomplish some of my other personal goals. I made countless new friends and got closer to old ones. And after all of that, I’m the Player of the Year.
I struggled a lot in the first half of the year. I lost win-and-ins for top 8 in the first two paper tournaments I played. I lost the top 4 of a PTQ in what I thought was a great matchup for me. I was also struggling in my classes, my fitness and my relationships. I didn’t lose my fire, but I was definitely not going about things in the right way. Despite the events not going my way, I was still having an awesome time traveling with my friends. Some of my favorite memories are going to the Olive Garden (which is one of four playable restaurants in Fort Wayne, Indiana!) and watching Will Krueger, Joe Bernal and Matt Hoey roll dice the whole time, losing rolls for drinks and dinner while talking trash with Dom six months later at the same Olive Garden, and getting a LEGO Mjolnir at the Mall of America (and then having to have Justin Brickman bring it to me at the next event because it wouldn’t fit in my carryon).
In Between the Tournaments
When I wasn’t playing all of the Magic tournaments, I had a lot keeping me busy. I’ve always loved triathlons, and this year I took a big step and competed in my first three Olympic-distance races. With a mile swim, a 24.8 mile bike and a 6.2 mile run, it was twice as far as the sprint races I usually do. I was slow, but it was an awesome step toward my eventual goal of completing an Iron Man. Getting to do them with my dad is a huge bonus! I started playing pickup basketball: at the start of the summer, I had to sit out every other game when we were playing half-court because my conditioning wasn’t there. At the end of the year, I’m still pretty bad, but now I’m able to play full-court games for an hour at 6:30 in the morning. I’m finishing a two-year Master’s degree in Student Affairs in Higher Education soon. I struggled a lot academically, but learned a lot in my different internships and assistantships. I got to supervise two different RA teams, run the tech table for events in the student union, and even got to teach my first class this past fall!
Despite no Top 8s, I made Top 16 of a handful of events, and I remember one conversation late at night on Discord with Will and Dom. We were talking about how it had been a rough first half of the year for us, and I pulled up a spreadsheet I was keeping and talked about how even though I hadn’t Top 8’d one of these events since October, I still had a 70% winrate. They asked me if that was really what I wanted to be focusing my mental energy on. Even though I was going 6-2 and 7-2 in lots of events, I was just playing a stock list of a strong deck and not really preparing for the events, and my mental game was not focused on actually winning the events that I claimed I wanted to win. I realized that they were absolutely right: I deleted that spreadsheet and tried to start focusing on showing up to events with good lists and good plans for the popular matchups, rather than patting myself on the back for achieving things that wouldn’t actually bring me to my goals. And to be clear, if your goal is to Top 16 a big event or to have a high win rate regardless of results, I think that’s awesome! But don’t get complacent when you know that your process could be better than it is.
That conversation happened on August 1st. Shortly before that, I had a conversation with Jesse Robkin about her win in the Minneapolis team tournament, and subsequently about how much I wanted a trophy. So when it came time to start getting ready for NRG St. Louis, I tried to be smarter about my preparation. I knew pretty early on that I was going to be playing Mono-Green Devotion, as it was far-and-away the best deck in Pioneer at the time. I spent time trying out the different versions that existed, including Mono-Green, a white splash and a black splash. I spent time talking about matchups with Jesse and Bill Comminos, another green gamer. I played some games, but tried to be very mindful about not having all of my testing just be jamming and instead incorporating lots of conversations and thinking about matchups.
I ended up settling on a small white splash in the sideboard, for Portable Hole and Glass Casket as Karn targets for the aggro matchups. My process paid off, as Theo, Maxx and I were able to take down the tournament. It didn’t go perfectly: I had a couple of matches where I made mistakes, got tilted and my teammates had to tell me it was ok to take time to collect myself. I’ve said it before, but playing against Jesse in the finals after we had prepared together on 73 of the same 75 cards was a highlight of the weekend. In one tournament, I had accomplished two of my major goals for the year: qualify for NRG Championships, and win a trophy.
The second was honestly more meaningful: since the start of the pandemic, I played so many tournaments on Magic Online and all I could think about was how I wanted to improve so that I could win a trophy. Taking it home (along with our token!) and showing my parents and grandparents the result of all that hard work was amazing.
With the qualification out of the way, I took my foot off the gas a little bit. I had been planning to play every tournament that year, but with not much to play for, I decided to not fly to Minneapolis for the September event. Newark in October was only a two-hour drive (the shortest I’d had all year!) and it was also a team tournament, with Will and Dom. We’d made the plans in March, but had been talking about teaming for an event together for nearly two years. We lost playing for Top 8 of that event, and the next day, I found myself playing another win-and-in, this time against my friend Justin Brickman, and this time on camera. The match got off to a bad start: I accidentally kept six cards on my mull to five, and Justin noticed it too late for there to be an easy fix. After a ten-minute judge call, it was determined that he could essentially Thoughtseize me to fix the mistake. We played a very long game one, and I got more and more flustered as I was beating myself up for the judge call. I made a pretty bad mistake in game one, exiling the wrong cards to my Underworld Breach and not leaving myself enough outs that would have won me the game on the final turn. In game two, I missed the fact that I had an onboard win because I got tunnel-visioned on dealing with one of his threats. Justin played really well, and losing a match that I know I would have won with correct play crushed me.
When I got home that night, I took a look at the top 8 photo. Justin stood there smiling, with his arm around Andrew Elenbogen, one of Michigan’s best players who I’m glad I’ve gotten to know better this year. Next to Andrew is Will, who I talk to every day and who has supported me during some really difficult times in my life. Will is next to my RIW Hobbies teammate, Raja Sulaiman, who is an excellent player and has always been welcoming to me from the time I first started showing up to PPTQs. At the end of the line is Stephen Dykman. Stephen and I spent long hours together road tripping to SCGs that were way too far in 2019. We made some great memories that year, and I wouldn’t be anywhere without all the advice he gave me in late-night Google Hangouts. Kneeling down in front of all of them is Zach Allen. On top of being an awesome player, Zach has been one of the most important people in my Magic journey. Having only met me twice, he invited me to join in for a car and a hotel room the first time I traveled out of Michigan to play a tournament. He lent 17-year-old me a playset of foil Tarmogoyfs (when it was the most expensive card in Modern) and has hooked me up with full decks countless other times. He beat me playing for Top 8 the first time I ever made a deep run in an SCG Open, and showed a lot of faith by offering me a place on Team RIW and got me started making content.
I really wanted to be in that Top 8. The best part of doing well in team tournaments is being able to celebrate shared success with your friends. It’s rare for that to happen like this in an individual tournament, and being in that picture with those five friends would have meant the world to me. I’m also pretty sure that this was the most stacked Top 8 of an NRG event all year, bar none. I honestly beat myself up a lot for that one match against Justin, and in the tournaments since I’ve made other mistakes that I’ve tried to be kinder to myself about. One thing that’s been helpful for me is a talk given by Simon Sinek, who talks about the importance of recognizing when you’re playing what he calls an infinite game. Sure, the individual day-to-day results of any given tournament matter, but they don’t matter as much as focusing on improvement in the long run. Eliminating mistakes isn’t a realistic goal for myself, but not making the same one twice is one of my biggest goals for 2023.
That Top 8 picture is now the background on my laptop, to remind me to slow down in my matches, to focus on what matters, and as a little kick in the rear. But most of all, it reminds me of the relationships I’ve made through Magic and the awesome moments that these tournaments create, despite the crushing losses.
The next tournament on the schedule was a team event in Fort Wayne. Leading up to the event, the plan was to have Kyle Boggemes on Pioneer and Adam Wasburn-Moses on Legacy, with me playing Breach in Modern. The day before the event, Kyle messaged to let us know that he wasn’t feeling well. We reached out to Raja (who had asked me earlier in the week if I knew anybody looking), who said that he was available and was most comfortable playing Modern. I got my Mono-Green cards together, Adam picked his favorite Legacy pile and we were good to go. As I was hopping into the shower on Saturday morning, Raja sent me a message asking if I thought he should play straight UW Control, or if he should splash for Wrenn and Six. I told him I wasn’t sure as I don’t play control, but I’d ask some people I was with. By the time I finished the shower, I had another message from him about the Wrenn version of the deck: “Put together a box with all the cards and then left it home. So the universe decided for me. Normal UW it is.”
Normal UW ended up being an awesome choice: we made it to the finals of the event, and that ended up being the first time all day that he dropped a match. A few times over the course of the day, he would ask me what I thought the right play was. I’d tell him my line, ask what he was thinking about, and then spend the next minute trying in vain to convince him that his line was way better than mine (usually it involved me missing lethal over the next turn or two that he had already mapped out). He would shrug, say that we would try mine, and then somehow still win. The only bad part of that tournament was that it was the first (and last!) time all year that NRG had the entire Top 8 play out on Saturday night. A 90-minute control mirror in the semifinals before a slightly shorter, but still marathon, finals led to us not leaving the site until 10:30 and them not making that mistake in their future events.
With the points from that weekend in Fort Wayne, I launched myself from around 10th on the NRG Series leaderboard to 3rd, one point behind Jesse and eight behind Zach. I had been planning to spend all of Thanksgiving weekend home with my family, but I talked to my parents and both of them encouraged me to go and play the two remaining tournaments. Even if it was a longshot, they told me I would regret not shooting for 1st place on the year. I put together a good run in the Mundelein 10k, with my only losses being to Theo in round 4 and again in Top 8. I had a rough start the next day: I started off 0-1 after messing up combat math and sat next to Jesse at the bottom tables in round 2. She and I talked a lot of smack as she 2-0’d Bill on 4C Control and I threw my match against Burn by playing too quickly. I decided to get it together and didn’t lose a match the rest of the day, drawing into Top 32 for a mincash after a 5-0 run. Salvaging that tournament gave me a narrow points lead going into Louisville, the final tournament of the year: 6 points ahead of Zach, and 12 ahead of Jesse.
Louisville: The Final Tournament
The modern tournament in Louisville wasn’t very eventful: I got off to a good 4-1 start, but lost a Hammer mirror to Dom and a really fun match against UW Urza. Luckily for me, neither Zach nor Jesse was able to Top 8 so I went into the Pioneer tournament with a 1-point lead. Zach and I both took our first loss to the Mono-Blue Spirits player who ended up winning the event. He and I had actually played twice in the team event in St. Louis, so it was fun to talk about those matches. After beating me, he said he hoped to see me again in the finals.
Going into the final round, I knew that I needed to Top 8 the event to lock things up. I was 5-1, but if I lost, I would need to fade Jesse winning the whole event. After sweating to make the champs last year and having Dom get there, I knew I needed to play my best game and not let it come down to somebody else. As pairings went up, I asked Raja if he could help with pairings math to see if I could draw, but then I got the text from Melee that said I was playing against Jesse. No intentional draws there! We hugged it out and immediately went to sit down at the primary feature match table, even before they called us over. We knew they couldn’t pass up an opportunity for TV that good. I texted my mom, and she was able to let some of her friends know to watch.
The matchup was Mono-White Humans, which is close but slightly favored for the white deck. I think that game 1 of that match was one of my best-played of the year. I made sure to take my time and think through everything. When I drew a Lair of the Hydra as my third land to not be able to play my Old-Growth Troll, I got tilted and almost picked up my cards but convinced myself to keep going. On the pivotal turn, I almost slammed Cavalier of Thorns to block, but asked myself what would happen if she had Brave the Elements: she had exactly 8 power to my 8 life points. I figured out that I could use Karn to put Haywire Mite in play, but then I went in the tank to figure out if I could actually win the game after doing that. I also tried to figure out what happened if she peeled a third land on me: she had been stuck on two lands for awhile and I knew that she likely had Brutal Cathar, which would kill me if I took the Karn line. I eventually decided that even if she were more likely to have Cathar in hand, she was more likely to be able to cast Brave the Elements, and that I would be able to win the game over the next few turns despite her killing my Karn. She untapped, thought for a few minutes, and cast Brave. I pumped the fist, and she told me not to celebrate yet. After I won that game, I let her know that even if the game was still close, I was celebrating that I had slowed down long enough to find the correct line there in a spot I hadn’t found myself in often. I went on to win a close game 3, locking up my third Top 8 of Season 3 and the Player of the Year title.
Winning feels incredible. Even if I couldn’t close out that particular tournament (I punted game 3 to the Spirits player who said we would meet in the finals), I was really happy with my weekend. As I’m writing this, I’m starting to get my decks together for the NRG Championship in two weeks and can’t wait to compete against some of the best. I’m testing with Piper Powell, and I’ll have an article for you next week about our process, our metagame predictions and why we chose whatever decks we end up on. I couldn’t have had the success I did this year without a lot of luck, and a lot of support from some really cool people, so of course I want to give some shoutouts:
Nerd Rage Gaming is the best tournament organizer in the business right now. They run fast and player-friendly events. I appreciate the COVID-19 safety precautions and haven’t heard of anybody getting sick from traveling to these. I appreciate everyone who works there now or has in the past taking the time to build relationships with their players and taking the time to listen to feedback. I especially want to thank Max for all of his hard work, Justin for lending me cards and being a fierce competitor with me in Season 3 (we gotta get that tiebreaker soon!), and Cori for being my friend.
I wouldn’t be able to travel to all of these events without the help of Pam and the rest of the crew at RIW Hobbies in Michigan. Getting to compete for a store whose players got me interested in competitive Magic in the first place has been an honor, and I’m optimistic that I can achieve more with their help than I ever could without.
To the best car buddy: I couldn’t have made it through all the long drives, especially through those cornfields at 2 a.m. without you. Seeing you crush this year has been awesome. I hear a lot of people say that the drive home on Sunday night is always miserable, but I always enjoy our conversations, our stories from the weekend and our smack talking. Even if I won’t be in Oxford much longer, I’m excited for future Friday night dinners, team events, and random messages where you somehow manage to trash-talk me in your dreams. Most of all, I look forward to that double weekend where I finally pass you!
Getting to know you and become friends this year has been awesome. After watching your growth as a player this year and all of your hard work, I know that while you may not be better than me now, it certainly won’t be long! I’m excited to see your 2023 now that you’re focusing on working smarter, not harder. I’m glad that we’ve gotten to compete in some of the highest-stakes matches I’ve played, and know that I’m going to be working hard to make sure that I get the win the next time we face off.
I really wouldn’t be able to do any of this without the support of my family. My brother Patrick and I learned to play Magic together, back in 2014 when an LGS opened in our hometown. My grandma always makes sure to ask how my tournaments are going and cheers me on. And especially my parents: my dad spent a lot of Friday nights parked outside the LGS when I was too young to drive, waiting for us to finish playing out the Top 8 sometime after midnight. My mom always encouraged me to make sure I have my priorities in order and wouldn’t let me play as many tournaments as I wanted in college. Since I’ve gotten other parts of my life in order, the two of them have been as supportive as I could ask for. Whenever I get called for a feature, I only really have time to send a couple of messages, and I always make sure to text them so they’re able to tune in.
Last, but certainly not least, I have to shout out all of my friends on Team Rocket. Originally the Enchanty Enthusiasts, we re-named ourselves after Nam realized how much he loved Calibrated Blast in Modern and I couldn’t have made it through this year without them. Between prepping for events, rolling dice for dinner, winning team tournaments together, and just talking about life I’m really grateful I’ve gotten closer to all of you this year. If it weren’t for you, wizard squares would be too boring to spend every weekend on.
Some of my goals for this year are going to be shared with friends, and some will be just for me. I have a lot, and I’m sure I’ll fail a lot. But I’m going to work hard even after I fail.
Have a full-time job in university admissions before I graduate
Run a 3:15 Olympic Triathlon
Be kinder to people, especially ones I may not like
For some of these goals, I think I’ll be able to accomplish them by prioritizing the right things. When it comes to hitting a faster time in my races or qualifying for the Magic Online Championship, I honestly think they’re longshots. But I just saw a video from David Goggins, who reminded me that if you only set goals you think you can achieve, you’re not going to get any better. They’re going to be really hard. The final goal is one that I know I can achieve. I’ve lost the equivalent of three PTQ finals in the last two years, and eventually one may fall my way. But it’s one that I’m terrified of not achieving. There aren’t as many shots now as there used to be, and so I’m going to use that fear to motivate me to be the best player I can be.
Parts of 2022 really sucked. But some of the things I shared here also made it one of the best years of my life. Thank you for following along, for cheering for me in events, and for reading. There’s a lot of choices I want to make that I hope will make 2023 even more of a year to remember.
