Extended PTQ Season: All You Need to Know

Hi everybody, and welcome to my guide to playing extended PTQs on Magic Online. Starting January 2^nd we saw the very first constructed Pro Tour Qualifier season online, with some serious prizes available. I’ll try and help you get your bearings so you can join in the competition, and maybe earn your place at Pro Tour: San Juan!

How do I get involved?

First things first, the basics. The online PTQs are Extended Constructed format. The entry fee is 25 Tickets, and you’ll need a 60 card Extended deck with a 15 card sideboard to enter — more on deck selection later. There will be a number of swiss rounds depending on participation, each of which will require a best of 3 Match. Rounds are limited to 50 minutes each, but given that the maximum capacity of these events is 768 entrants I would not plan to do anything else on the day of a PTQ if you intend to play. The events can be found in the Premier Event Room on Magic Online.

What days will those PTQs be? I’m glad you asked, as I’ve pinched this handy table that tells you exactly when they are taking place. There are sixteen in total with exactly half occurring in January. There are two in the middle of February, five in the second half of March, and one on the 2^nd of April. Keep these gaps in mind when plotting your PTQ attempts — there’s no point testing for all of January in preparation for your big run at the pro tour in February, there just aren’t many events at that time. If you are ready to play right now I recommend going all out in January but if you are just beginning with Extended, March has a solid couple of weeks as well.

Prizes

At the end of the swiss rounds there will be a Top 8 playoff. Only the overall winner qualifies for the Pro Tour, but anyone finishing higher than 65^th wins number of packs as outlined below. You’ll notice that the winner of the Tour invite does not get plane fare as many paper PTQ-winners do. I imagine this is due to some legal questions about online gambling, but instead you are entered into the ‘Superdraft’ that takes place at the PT. This event is only for MTGO PTQ winners and has a guaranteed prize of $1000 for every entrant, which is basically a backhanded way of paying for your flight. Note that prizes fall away very quickly, and past 32^nd you aren’t even getting back your entry fee in prizes. If you are going to enter one of these, you’d better be playing to win!

So now you know when the PTQs are happening and what prizes are there to entice you to enter, it’s time to get down to a bit of strategy so you aren’t going in blind. Extended is a far more open format than Standard. There are plenty of established decks you should be aware of and endeavour to get in some practice against. You can find many decklists for the archetypes discussed below and others here, study them well.

Aggro

Mono-Red Burn

Popular because of its low price tag, dismiss the “mindless burn deck” at your peril. This deck can deal 20 to the face in very short order, with recent sets giving it some real boosts like Hellspark Elemental, Goblin Guide, and the return of Lightning Bolt. Take this archetype into account when testing your deck— a lot of decks give the Burn player a real helping hand by taking 5+ damage from their lands, and some life gain out of your sideboard can really turn the match around — Kitchen Finks is an ideal option for creature decks, for example.

Little Zoo

This deck has been around for a long time now, and its game plan hasn’t changed much in that time — put all the best <3 mana aggressive creatures together with the best mana-fixing lands and some burn. Stir well and attack your opponent with everything until they fall over. Zoo will generally be attacking for 3+ on turn 2 and the damage piles up exponentially from there. Wild Nacatl, Kird Ape, and Steppe Lynx lead the charge with Tarmogoyf playing the role of expensive finisher. There is a domain variation, playing all 5 colors along with Might of Alara and Tribal Flames but it plays very similarly to this one.

Affinity

This is Affinity’s last year of legality, and it looks like it is going out with not a bang, but a whimper. The M10 rules changes really hurt its Arcbound Ravager plan, and creatures have improved so much recently that Turn 1 Frogmite or Turn 2 Myr Enforcer is just not impressive compared to Goblin Guide or Tarmogoyf. That is not to say the deck is worthless as it still has Cranial Platings and Ornithopters to carry them, but you can probably put the Kataki’s away for the time being. I also have no idea how Affinity beats Rubin Zoo as Punishing Fire kills most of its creatures, and Baneslayer Angel kills them all.

(Content Manager Note: this article was written prior to the last PTQ results.)

Midrange

Rubin Zoo

One of the most popular decks around, this is a midrange deck — one that plays Aggro against slow decks and Control against faster decks. Its ability to play Aggro should be obvious, between Nacatl, Tarmogoyf, and Knight of the Reliquary, but its power against Control comes from the synergy between Grove of the Burnwillows and Punishing Fire — with the burn spell in your graveyard, tapping your Grove gives you a trigger to get it back, and the Red mana to pay for it. This two damage machine gun is very difficult for smaller Aggro decks like Zoo and Affinity to beat, especially with Baneslayer Angel deciding the race when the game goes even slightly long.

Bant

Trading Red for Blue, Bant takes a more disruptive path than Rubin Zoo but plays a similar midrange role. With 9 counterspells maindeck and Meddling Mage and Vendilion Clique to stop troublesome spells before they’re even cast, it can be difficult for the slower opponent to get their gameplan off the ground while Tarmogoyf is making a mess of their life total. Rhox War Monk and Umezawas Jitte help against opposing aggro decks, and the eight exalted creatures help your Tarmogoyf beat his twin on the other side of the board.

Control

Thopter Foundry Control, or ‘The Tezzerator’

Several different builds of this have shown up over the past couple of months — all of which are designed to control the board until it can land Thopter Foundry and Sword of the Meek and protect them. With these two cards in play you can sacrifice Sword of the Meek to the Foundry to gain 1 life and make a 1/1 artifact creature token — which brings Sword of the Meek back into play. Repeat as often as you like to make a huge army and put your life total out of reach. This is one of the strongest end game scenarios possible and with plenty of options for tutoring — Gifts Ungiven and Muddle the Mixture are very popular — it is very difficult to stop the Thopter player setting it up.

Hexmage/Depths

This one is a bit hard to classify — most of the deck is made up of powerful disruptive elements, but its finisher is the combination of Vampire Hexmage and Dark Depths. Hexmage can remove all the counters from Depths which produces a 20/20 flying, indestructible token, which obviously ends the game ASAP. This can happen as early as Turn 2 but the deck is capable of going long, using its Control elements like Engineered Explosives to keep the opponent off balance until the perfect opportunity to go for the throat arrives. This Combo is very compact — using only four land slots and four spell slots — so it is possible to fit in alternative Combos in the deck as well, such as the Thopter/Sword pairing discussed above.

Combo

Scapeshift

Combo is by far the most well represented category in Extended, and Scapeshift is the most popular deck overall. Essentially the plan is to get out extra lands as quickly as possible until you have 7 in play, then resolve Scapeshift and fetch Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle and 6 Mountains. The Mountains will see each other in play and thus all trigger Valakut, dealing eighteen damage to the opponent. The last two damage comes from either the opponent’s own shockland or attacking with the land fetching creatures. Alternatively, waiting until you have eight lands and getting two Valakuts means thirty-six damage, which should be enough against all but the most dedicated life gain strategies. This is the one deck that you must understand and prepare for if playing Extended online, as it is by far the most popular deck currently.

Dredge

Probably the most powerful deck in the format, Dredge is vulnerable to dedicated graveyard hate after sideboarding – but little else. Its Combo is quite complicated and requires a lot of practice to play well, but essentially you use Hedron Crab or Drowned Rusalka to put a dredge card like Stinkweed Imp into your graveyard. Using these dredge cards you put even more of your library into the graveyard, eventually getting enough free creatures — like Bloodghast and Narcomoeba — into play to pay the flashback cost of a Dread Return in your graveyard. These sacrifices give you a bunch of zombies from multiple Bridge From Belows and Dread Return gives you Flame-Kin Zealot or Iona for the win. This Combo is almost impossible to resist if you are not prepared with Tormods Crypt, Ravenous Trap, or something similar. Definitely practice sideboarded games against Dredge as part of your preparation.

Hypergenesis

Previously only Ancestral Visions was playable amongst this cycle of ‘must suspend’ spells, but the arrival of cascade means it is trivially easy to both find and play them without paying their mana cost — which means you can play Hypergenesis immediately, without having to suspend it. By having no other spells cheaper than 3 mana, the Hypergenesis deck ensures its Ardent Plea and Violent Outburst always find Hypergenesis, hopefully with a hand stacked with fatties like Progenitus or Sundering Titan that can present an unstoppable board position on Turn 2 or 3. Chalice of the Void set to zero or counterspells are most people’s choice of weapon against this deck, as a resolved Hypergenesis is usually difficult to beat.

All-In Red

Similarly to the above two Combos, AIR tries to play unfairly and present an imposing board position on the early turns. Tons of mana rituals plus Chrome Mox allow this deck to generate enough mana on Turn 1 or 2 to lay down Demigod of Revenge or Deus of Calamity, or depending on the matchup a Turn 1 Blood Moon might be the right play. With the quantity of nonbasic lands going around at extended tables, Blood Moon and Magus of the Moon are two of the most powerful disruptive effects available. The deck’s weakness is in its name, it really does go “All In” on one threat — and if you can trump that threat, the AIR player essentially rolls over.

Which should I pick?

Well, that I’m not able to answer before the metagame starts to form in the early PTQs. This article is only the briefest introduction to the format as it stands Online. Judging by the Daily and Premier Events on MTGO, Scapeshift is the most popular deck at the moment, with Burn, Rubin Zoo, Bant and Thopter Control also well represented. Burn is by far the cheapest deck, followed by anything that doesn’t rely on Ravnica lands for its mana production — Hypergenesis, All-In Red and Affinity are all fairly cheap compared to the more expensive decks. Keep track of what is doing well in the coming events and see if you can figure out how to beat those decks. Read a bunch of articles on the format and see if you can find a friend or group of friends to test with. I would not be surprised to see any of the above decks (except Affinity) take down a PTQ and they are all reasonable choices.

I hope this outline of the basics has been helpful and maybe inspired some of you to get involved in extended on Magic Online. I for one am bored of standard at the moment and playing a format with nearly a dozen competitive decks is truly refreshing. All feedback and discussion is more than welcome in the comments, or you can find me on twitter @rtassicker and my blog at Gwafa’s Bazaar.

Thanks,

Russell