Last weekend, I played one of my first competitive paper tournaments (all my PT qualifications were online), and managed to win the Limited Regional Championship Qualifier (RCQ) I was playing. Exciting as winning was, I also had a bunch of insights on playing paper Magic that will hopefully be helpful in the future.
As a break from tradition, I did no prep whatsoever in the week leading up to this tournament. I felt fairly confident that my experience working on Streets of New Capenna Sealed earlier this year would continue to be relevant. I ended up getting to the tournament on around five hours of sleep, since I had to get up early for the commute.
Playing in the actual tournament, I opened a pool that played well to my understanding of the format. My pool was decent with a few powerful commons, and Hostile Takeover was absolutely broken, but this was by no means the strongest pool I saw all day. In fact, several of my opponents had significantly higher raw power levels in their pools, but fortunately my understanding of the format let me build a grindier deck that almost always won the late game. This isn’t to say my pool was bad – it’s definitely well within the top 20 percent of pools – but the fundamentals that I mention in my SNC Sealed Guide let me build what felt like the best late game deck in the room.
