Nfro

Eric Froehlich
35 mins ·
Another extremely disappointing Worlds finish. Came into today at 4-3 and finished 6-8. Not sure there's much else I could have realistically done.
Limited is the key in all of these big tournaments. Has been for a long time and likely always will be. It is an extremely rare event in this age of internet that a team completely breaks it (outside of CawBlade), and so the average great player will go about 6-4 in Constructed in PTs +/- 2 wins due to variance. Limited is where the real edge is gained assuming you have at least a reasonable deck and position on the format.
I've been consistently putting up Limited results, but I went 1-5 in this tournament. I was really prepared and the worst thing that can happen in these events are trainwreck drafts, but that didn't happen either. My MMA draft was an extremely strong Affinity deck, either the best or second best deck in the format and extremely open. The best deck at the table was to my immediate right, and there is simply nothing that can be done about that if you're trying to maximize your own equity. I had to hope to not play him since I would be a small underdog, but unfortunately I lost to one of the mediocre decks after a crazy string of events and then got paired against the nut token deck at 1-1 (and died with Elesh Norn in my hand and 6 lands in play both games). My 2-1 with upside to 3-0 deck went 1-2.
The Origins draft provided me with a good but unspectacular deck. It turned out after seeing the other lists that I had the second best deck at the table, however. Unfortunately, the best deck was one I could legitimately never beat, but again it was to my right and very little I could or should do about that. I had some bad luck with the color distribution variance in the packs, but I was in the right colors and the open archetype, wheeling strong cards pack 3. I got very unfortunate to get paired vs the deck I could never beat round 1, getting demolished in 2 straight. I then got paired up vs a 1-0 deck, which is rather unlucky, although I had a very large deck advantage. I lost a close 3 after some pretty crazy events. I unfortunately got paired up for the 3rd time in round 3 and my poor draws matched up poorly against very good draws and I went 0-3 with another solid 2-1 deck (IMO).
Working with Shahar was great and I really like where we were at in Constructed. We nailed where the Modern metagame was and, despite being clueless as to what people would play in Standard, had a solid deck there as well. We went 7-5 in Constructed vs the field, getting paired in both formats against each other in 75 card mirrors.
This is the greatest tournament in the world, so it was extremely painful to basically not get to play great games of Magic. I nearly got to play a great game vs Hayne after I mulliganed in the Jeskai mirror, got to come back after he bricked for 2-3 turns, but I ran off 10 straight lands to end up just getting steam rolled with no more Magic to be played from an advantaged board state. The rest of my rounds had very little interaction. My wins mostly came on the back of mana issues, nut draws, or Living End randomly never finding a cascade spell. My losses were the same. The thrill of the tournament is playing the highest level competition in some spectacular Magic and that never happened for me this event. The formats aren't especially great at allowing that to happen, but not really sure how that can be changed. Either way, the top 4 is pretty fantastic. Lot of deserving potential champions remaining, but hoping for a Rietzl victory on Sunday. Getting to add 6 more pro points is awesome, so hopefully I can put up some great PT results and find my way back here next year!