This weekend and next are the first Players Tour events on Arena, with coverage of all four on Magic’s Twitch channel, beginning at 12am PDT on Saturday, June 13th. Each event will be Standard, with 15 rounds plus Top 8 playoff over two days and have $150,000 in prizes. All players that finish with at least 33 match points will be invited to the Players Tour Finals in July.
This will be my first Players Tour event, having won a WPN Qualifier at my local game store in Des Moines, IA in March. It was the last weekend of tabletop events before everything was canceled due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Two weeks prior to that, I had lost in the finals of a 145-player Pioneer PTQ in Minneapolis, and I had lost in the finals of another Standard WPN Qualifier in Kansas City a month before that, so it felt great to finally break through!
The deck I won the WPN Qualifier with was Rakdos Sacrifice, and in the end, I chose to stick to the same deck for this Players Tour. The preparation for this event was strange, with the bannings of Fires of Invention and Agent of Treachery, along with the companion nerf, only being implemented on Arena last Friday. With only one week to figure things out, I planned to try a variety of decks and default back to Rakdos if I was unable to come up with a new strategy. Some were close, but ultimately it was hard to pass up the consistency of Rakdos.
Author: Robert Taylor
