Pro Tour Kaladesh: Day Two Live Updates
Hello everyone and welcome back for our live coverage of the second day of Pro Tour Kaladesh! Much like yesterday, we'll be breaking down the action round-by-round in real time as the tournament unfolds in Hawaii. Things will be a bit different for day two since we've already seen pretty much all of the new decks, so instead of spending most of our time talking about deck lists, we'll focus more on individual cards, observations, and a meta-discussion of which decks are performing well and have a chance to make it to the Sunday Top 8! If you're looking for decklists, check out yesterday's Pro Tour Kaladesh coverage. Once again, we'll skip over the the limited rounds and pick up the action in Round 12, the first constructed round of day two. If you just want to get down to business, check out the Top 8 Decklists from Pro Tour Kaladesh.
Round 12
Let's start by recapping the major price movements from day one. Based on the first day of action, we have a total of six cards that have increased at least 100% in response to the decks that have shown up at Pro Tour Kaladesh. While not the biggest winners (by percentage), clearly the two most important Kaladesh cards from the tournament so far are Aetherworks Marvel (up 133% to $19) and Torrential Gearhulk (up 122% also to $19). Both of these cards were on camera a ton during the first day of Pro Tour Kaladesh. Based on the performances of the decks they are found in, it seems likely both will continue to appear over the course of the weekend, and Aetherworks Marvel making the Top 8 is a good bet at this point, considering it started the tournament at nearly 20% of the field.
Electrostatic Pummeler and Bristling Hydra, two of the key pieces to the GR Energy combo deck, are next on our list. Electrostatic Pummeler increased almost 600% to over $4, and Bristling Hydra 180% to $3.50, which is somewhat surprising because the deck hasn't really been on camera. While it did get a deck tech and is one of the most played decks in the field (coming in fifth on day one), at this point the prices spikes seem to be a combination of pure speculation and Magic Online hype from earlier in the week. Keep an eye out for the deck though, it does absurd things and it only takes one feature match with a 40/40 double striking Electrostatic Pummeler closing out the game on turn four for the cards to spike again.
Lastly we have a couple of artifacts with Metalwork Colossus and Dynavolt Tower. Personally, I'm skeptical about Metalwork Colossus, mostly because it got the very first feature match of the day yesterday and then completely disappeared from coverage. When the day two metagame breakdown comes out, we'll see if it was just bad luck, or if it's because the deck had a bad day one. On the other hand, Dynavolt Tower is floating near the top tables and could have a chance to show up on Sunday. I'll be tracking the progress of Pierre Dagon throughout day two to see if a Top 8 birth is likely.
As far as the gameplay itself, we start in the 9-2 bracket with Grixis Emerge (which looks pretty similar to the deck that took second at the week one SCG tournament) against Mardu Vehicles (which is actually RW Vehicles splashing for Unlicensed Disintegration and Unceremonious Rejection). We've seen quite a bit of Elder Deep-Fiend over the weekend, and while it's unclear how grindy, graveyard-based emerge decks compete with Aetherworks Marvel, being one of the better Kozilek's Return decks in the format is appealing if RW Vehicles remains near the top of the format.
Speaking of keeping up with Aetherworks Marvel, one of the backup feature matches features Grixis Control versus Temur Aetherworks. While the sample size is small, the matchup looks pretty difficult for the Aetherworks Marvel deck. As we talked about yesterday, Aetherworks Marvel is great when things are going well, but when your Aetherworks Marvel gets countered, you are left playing random puzzleknots and Glint-Nest Cranes. Another card to keep an eye on is Thing in the Ice. After being endlessly hyped during spoiler season, it started off slowly but eventually found a home in Modern alongside Pyromancer Ascension, and may now be a four-of in Standard thanks to the Grixis Control deck that has a reasonable shot of ending up in the Top 8.
After the round, we are treated to a deck tech featuring Blue-Red Control splashing Nahiri:
Round 13
As we're waiting for some interesting gameplay, let's take a look at the day two metagame breakdown and see what's changed over the past 24 hours. There were a massive 466 players on day one of Pro Tour Kaladesh and 293 players are back for day two. This means that 62.9% of the field did well enough to play on day two. As a result, in analyzing the individual decks, this is the baseline. While the split format complicates things, generally speaking, decks that put more than 62.9% of their players into day two did well, and decks that put less than 62.9% of their players into day two did poorly. So where does this leave us?
| Deck | # Day 1 | # Day 2 | Conversion Rate |
| Temur Aetherworks | 82 | 55 | 67.1% |
| BG Delirium | 55 | 30 | 54.5% |
| BR Aggro | 38 | 23 | 60.5% |
| GR Energy | 31 | 19 | 61.2% |
| RW Vehicles | 29 | 20 | 69% |
| BR Madness | 21 | 15 | 71.4% |
| Jeskai Control | 18 | 11 | 61.1% |
| Bant Midrange | 13 | 9 | 69.2% |
| Mardu Vehicles | 13 | 7 | 53.8% |
While the story yesterday was that the aggro decks were not as heavily played as many people expected, the story of day two is that two of the aggro options in RW Vehicles and BR Madness posted two of the best conversion rates and increased their metagame percentage heading into day two. Other successful decks include Temur Aetherworks, which has been the talk of the tournament thus far, and Bant Midrange which is a bit of a sleeper; it hasn't been featured or mentioned on coverage a single time, perhaps because many people are still burnt out from last season's Bant Company deck.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Mardu Vehicles, which is apparently being punished for its splash color, coming in more than 15% worse than its RW relative and posting the worst conversion rate of any of the major decks at just 53.8%. GB Delirium is still the second most-played deck on day two, but had a pretty miserable day one, just barely avoiding the worst conversion rate.
What about the lesser played decks at Pro Tour Kaladesh? We were wondering about Temur Colossus, which got an early feature yesterday and then disappeared from coverage all together, but now we have some good news about the Metalwork Colossus deck: all seven of its players made their way to day two, so there is still a chance it shows up on coverage today, or even sneaks its way into the Top 8 tomorrow. Along the same lines, old-school RW Humans (one of the best decks before the release of Kaladesh), put six of seven into day two. Meanwhile, down at the very bottom of the list we have some spicy tech with a single RW Equipment deck, a single Mono-White Colorless deck, and a single Four-Color Vehicle deck making it to the second day of the competition.
As for the gameplay in Round 13, the story is the colorless cards. The main feature is Metalwork Colossus versus Dynavolt Tower, while in the backup match we have a Thought-Knot Seer sighting from one of the more interesting decks in the tournament, Mono-White Colorless, a deck that reminds me a lot of Eldrazi and Taxes in Modern. While the deck is only being played by a single player in the entire tournament, that one player is doing well enough to be at the top tables in Round 13. We are getting near the end of the Eldrazi lifespan with Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch rotating in about six months. Since they are now relegated to the fringe of the format, I would expect to see all of the Eldrazi that aren't being cheated into play with Aetherworks Marvel to start a long, slow slide towards rotation. It's unlikely that these cards will drop too far because they're not extremely expensive and because they are part of a tier one Modern deck. I'd look towards selling my copies now if I'm not using them in Modern.
Maybe the most important part of the Metalwork Colossus/Dynavolt Tower match is that it's essentially an elimination match for the Top 8. While we don't know for sure, it seems possible that these are the only two players with these decks in the running for Sunday. It's hard to overstate the impact that making a Top 8 has on a deck (and therefore the prices of the cards in the deck). Making a Top 8 almost guarantees a deck will see play moving forward, while ending up with a Top 16 can often leave a deck floating in the aether. In the end, it's the sideboard tech from the UR Spells deck—Niblis of Frost —which locks down the 10/10 Metalwork Colossus and allows Pierre Dagen to move on to 10-3 and remain in the running for the Top 8.
For our deck tech, Frank Karsten gives us the Standard take on Zoo:
Round 14
With only three rounds of constructed left to go, we are getting to the point where the main question is what decks (and cards) will make it to the Top 8 and get another entire day of hype and video coverage. Round 14 starts with another elimination match, this time with Mardu Vehicles against UR Emerge. Considering that there are a lot more Vehicle decks at the top tables, the match matters much more for the future of Emerge decks than it does for Vehicles. Smuggler's Copter is likely to come out of Pro Tour Kaladesh a winner regardless of how this match turns out, but after a strong start on day one, we haven't seen much of Elder Deep-Fiend and friends. Making it to the Top 8 would go a long way to cementing the future of the archetype. Unfortunately, Levy's UR Emerge deck fell swiftly to the more aggressive Vehicle deck, ending its hopes for a Top 8 finish.
Since we don't have anything new to talk about as far as feature matches at the moment, let's step back for a minute and talk about the big picture. We are starting to get some data on how card prices react with the two-rotation-per-year schedule, and the preliminary findings suggest that the next month or so will be the last peak for Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch cards. Think about what is coming before rotation this spring: First, we have Commander and the lull for the holiday season (which is sneaking up on us). Then we have Aether Revolt with spoilers starting immediately after the new year, which does bring along with it a Pro Tour, but by this point the focus of the community will have shifted to Modern Masters 2017 (coming out in March). Then we'll have Amonkhet spoilers into another rotation. As such, Pro Tour Kaladesh is Battle for Zendikar block's last chance to really shine on Magic's biggest stage.
As such, it's going to be more important than ever to carefully manage your collection, which means making some tough choices. Gideon, Ally of Zendikar is a great example. While it's still a very playable card and you may very well want it at some point over the next few months, it hasn't had a particularly good showing at Pro Tour Kaladesh. It's currently sitting at about $20 and the price will likely end up being half of that by the time we get to rotation.
This leaves us with a depressing equation. The best case for Gideon, Ally of Zendikar is that it manages to maintain its current price for another month or two before crashing. There's almost no conceivable event that could suddenly make it spike to $30 or $40 at this point in its Standard life. Basically, there's no upside. So the question becomes just how much do you need Gideon, Ally of Zendikar? It is worth losing $10 per copy to hold it for a few more months until rotation? I can't really answer this question for you. It probably depends on how much you are actually using it, how often you are playing, and a bunch of other variables. The important thing is to think it through, and then run through the same equation for the rest of the important cards from Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch. The good news is many of the cards from Oath of the Gatewatch and Battle for Zendikar are already fairly low in value, so there's only a handful of cards (including Kozilek's Return, Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet, Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, Sylvan Advocate and Thought-Knot Seer) that really matter, and some of those are safer than others based on significant Modern play, which should soften their fall at rotation.
As far as the gameplay, we have two decks that are very close to locking up Top 8 births with two rounds left to go. The first is RW Vehicles (featuring Reckless Bushwhacker) in the hands of Makis Matsoukas playing in his very first Pro Tour. With a win this round, Makis is officially locked into the Top 8 which means we're guaranteed at least one Smuggler's Copter deck on Sunday. The other one is less guaranteed: With Shota Yasooka winning again this round with his amazing Grixis Control deck, he needs just one more win to push the Thing in the Ice/Torrential Gearhulk build onto the Sunday stage. While it's still possible that he misses, based on his dominance with the deck and mastery of control, I would be surprised to see him miss. Get your Thing in the Ices now!
For our inter-round deck tech, Matt Nass shows off Temur Aetherworks:
Round 15
We start Round 15 with one of the classic Magic battles: Control versus Aggro. Reid Duke is on WR Vehicles and a loss away from elimination, against Shota Yasooka, playing what is essentially a win-and-in with Grixis Control. While I'm a huge Reid Duke fan, I'm even a bigger fan of control (and this Grixis list is especially exciting), and considering we are already guaranteed to have a RW Vehicles deck in the Top 8, a win here means much more for Grixis Control than it does for the car deck. In the end, after an extremely hard fought three game match, it was Shota taking down the match (and likely locking up a Top 8 birth), aided by a sweet play where he used Negate to counter one of his own spells to remove the last counter off of his Thing in the Ice.
From a more meta-perspective, Pro Tour Kaladesh is trying something new. Instead of the old style of Top 8 where the #1 seed plays the #8 seed, we have a new system of byes. The first round will feature the bottom four players of the Top 8 battling it out, with the top four getting a bye. The second round adds in the #3 and #4 seeds to play against the winners of the first round, and then the #1 and #2 seeds finally join the fray in the semifinals. The main reason for this change is to get rid of intentional draws and concessions in the last rounds of the tournament, and so far it seems to be working. It's possible that Reid and Shota would have simply shook hands under the old system, but now they are playing it out, which is great for everyone watching from home.
By this point in the tournament, we have a pretty good sense of the narrative, and maybe the most interesting story of day two isn't the decks what we have seen, but the deck that we haven't seen. GR Energy started off day one near the top of the format, and both Electrostatic Pummeler and Bristling Hydra were on our winners list at the start of the day, but we haven't heard a peep about the deck for the entirety of day two. It hasn't shown up on camera, it hasn't gotten a deck tech (although it had one yesterday), it hasn't even been mentioned in passing by the coverage team. While the deck's conversion rate wasn't great, it wasn't horrible either, so it's odd that it hasn't shown up at all. It will be interesting to see if the deck—which is really good at killing on turn four—simply fades away due to the lack of promotion at the Pro Tour, or if it can overcome its lack of camera time and remain a major part of the Kaladesh Standard format. It was the deck on Magic Online only a couple of days ago, which provides another example of just how fast formats change between release day and Pro Tour weekend.
We haven't talked much about Magic Online tonight, so let's briefly check in on the price movement of digital cards. Clearly the biggest winners today are the colors blue and red, with Spirebluff Canal, Wandering Fumarole, Thing in the Ice, and Torrential Gearhulk coming in near the top of the biggest winners list. Another group that had a good day on Magic Online was fastlands in general, with several members of the cycle increasing in the past 24 hours. As such, it appears that the early Magic Online money is heading towards UR Spells and Grixis Control. If you're playing on Magic Online over the next couple of days, expect to see a lot of these decks.
For our last deck tech, Oliver Polak-Rottmann brings us Metalwork Collosus:
Round 16
Round 16 begins with confusion thanks to the new system of byes. There are a total of three players that are locked into the Top 8, a RW Vehicles deck, a Grixis Control deck, and a Temur Aetherworks deck. Then there is something like 16 people fighting for the last five slots, and depending on what happens with the top players—who are incentivized to play in an effort to get one of the top two seeds in the Top 8 and a double bye—up to three players on x-4 could potentially make the Top 8, which means we have almost no idea what will happen.
The good news is that we start with a straightforward win-and-in between two decks we haven't really seen much of on day two: GB Delirium and Jeskai Control. As a result, one of these two decks will make their way into the Top 8 tomorrow. The GB Delirium deck, which came into the event as the second most-played, has really fallen off the map on day two, but sneaking a player into the Top 8 offers a pathway to redemption for what I expect we'll find to be an overall disappointing performance at Pro Tour Kaladesh. Meanwhile, Jeskai Control making the Top 8 could be huge for Dovin Baan, immediately moving it to the top of the Kaladesh planeswalker pile and potentially giving it a bit of a price pump, depending on how Sunday plays out. In the end, it's the multiple copies of Torrential Gearhulk which pushes the Jeskai Control deck through to the Top 8!
After watching people dump Emrakul, the Promised End on the battlefield on turn four with Aetherworks Marvel all weekend, seeing GB Delirium playing it fairly looks sort of odd. While turn eight Emrakul, the Promised End is still fine, it's not nearly as game ending as it is a few turns earlier. Clearly the biggest development of the weekend regarding the Eldrazi titan is the fact that it suddenly finds itself as a four-of in one of the best decks in Standard, which represents a massive increase in play compared to the previous 1.6 copies per deck before the Pro Tour. Is this enough to push up the price of Emrakul, the Promised End? Theoretically yes, but it still remains to be seen just how good the deck really is. It's already $20, and while it stays in the format through the next rotation, getting much past $25 or maybe $30 seems unlikely. Temur Aetherworks felt inconsistent heading into the weekend, and it still looks inconsistent. Plus it seems to struggle against control decks, which maybe be on the rise now that we know there will be at least two different builds in the Top 8.
In other news, Pierre Dagen is going to make the Top 8 with his Dynavolt Tower deck, which is pretty exciting. We've seen the deck on camera a few times over the course of the weekend, and it looks amazingly fun. It's a counter burn deck with an impressive sideboard plan involving Intro Pack rare Niblis of Frost. While being an Intro Pack rare means that having any financial relevance is a long shot, the Pro Tour performance does suggest that the 3/3 fliers is playable in Standard, and maybe even very good in Standard in the right deck. The other exciting development of Round 16 is we finally get a list for Shota's Grixis Control list!
Top 8
Here's your Top 8 for Pro Tour Kaladesh. Click here for decklists.
- Makis, Matsoukas [Greece]
- Shota Yasooka [Japan]
- Pierre Dagen [France]
- Matt Nass [USA]
- Carlos Ramao [Brazil]
- Ben Hull [Canada]
- Lee Shi Tian [Hong Kong]
- Joey Manner [USA]
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. Make sure to tune in tomorrow for the Top 8 of Pro Tour Kaladesh. Despite worries that it would be all Smuggler's Copter all the time, the Top 8 is actually amazingly diverse, featuring a ton of different archetypes. So what stuck out to you about day two of Pro Tour Kaladesh? Let me know in the comments, and I'll talk to you tomorrow!
