At Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel Super Heroes, Draft will return to the Sunday stage for the first time in over a decade. The Top 8 draft will follow two drafts and ten rounds of Modern during the Swiss portion of the tournament, and it's a special opportunity for the players who make the Top 8 cutoff and the viewers at home.
"You never know who's going to win when it gets to the Top 8," said Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, who won the last Top 8 draft back at Pro Tour Rise of the Eldrazi in 2010. "If you have a Constructed Top 8, you're like, 'Well, these people have been doing really well in Constructed. Their deck is really good.' You can sort of map out how it's going to go and which decks beat what. But with a draft, every draft starts over. You get to the Top 8, and it's really a blank slate. Everyone is on even ground when you get to that Top 8, so I think that that part is different.
"I think a Top 8 draft is great because it is more skill testing in game—and I don't just say this because I'm biased because obviously it's my favorite, and I think most people would agree," said Limited aficionado Ben Stark, who made the Top 8 of Pro Tour San Diego in 2004, which featured a draft of Mirrodin and Darksteel. "There's a lot of skill in Constructed when it comes to building a deck and watching the metagame, and that's really hard and you can make a fair comparison to Limited. But in terms of in-game play, I think the vast majority of players would agree that the technical play is more skill testing in Limited than in Constructed. I just think it's a better measure of skill. It's exciting to see a Top 8 where the very best players play Limited, which will test their skills way more, and in much more precise and intricate ways."
A Top 8 draft has the potential to change players' strategies and mindsets before they even set foot in the event hall in Amsterdam.
"For me, it's the preparation piece, the total change in preparation," said Mike Turian, who also made the Top 8 of Pro Tour San Diego. "For Constructed, you're like, 'Okay, who's my opponent and how should I sideboard?' But for a draft, that's not the case. There's this excitement about what you will open, who's sitting next to you, which cards will pass to you, and whether you will stick with them. In Constructed, you can't shift. My deck is set for Game 1, and basically your sideboard strategy is set for the other games. There's this openness. In some ways, a draft is this totally fresh experience that is a complete reset, and that reset is exciting.
"Drafts don't always work out according to your plans. In Constructed, the games are all different, of course, but you build your deck and it either works or it doesn't. In a draft, you have the draft portion, the deck-building portion, and the play portion. There are so many variables. To me, those variables really add to the excitement level and the hype level of, 'Yes, I'm ready. Yes, I'm prepared. Please, please let it work out.'"
For Stark, a Top 8 draft had the possibility of affecting his deck choice for the Modern rounds of the Pro Tour.
"I'm very big on playing a deck that is good at the end of tournaments, not at the beginning of tournaments. It's why I play a lot of heavy metagame-focused decks, spicy decks, and so on, because the goal is to assess the field, think about what types of cards and decks are going to do well against that field, and bring something that's going to do well against that at the end of the tournament when you're playing for Top 8 or in the Top 8, because that's where all the glory and value is in a Magic tournament.
"When you're not playing Constructed in the Top 8, you're thinking more about 'How do I beat the expected opening field?' and less about 'How do I have a deck that has an edge against the Top 8, Top 4, and the finals?' That is very different than the opening field because you expect certain decks, cards, and types of strategies to rise to the top against a given field. You're now trying to have a deck that's good for the second five rounds of Constructed, not just the first, and you're no longer trying to have a deck that's good after the second five rounds of Constructed."
None of those changes in the lead-up to the Pro Tour quite compare with the difference between sitting down for a Constructed Top 8 versus a Top 8 draft.
"You're just really hoping you open a bomb and have an easy draft," said Damo da Rosa. "A lot of the time, drafts have many different levels of difficulty. Sometimes you have those drafts where you don't know what colors you're supposed to be in and each pack is very hard to parse. You don't really know what you're supposed to do, and you make the wrong decision, and you trainwreck the whole thing. And sometimes you open one of the best cards in the set and it's a blue card and you just take it, then the next pack has another blue card, you take that, and your draft flows very naturally without hitting a hard decision point.
"As you're going into one of the most important gaming moments of your life, you probably just want to have an easy time. You don't want a lot of pressure. You don't want to have to make split-second decisions on whether to abandon a color in the first few minutes, decisions that are going to have very large consequences on your draft, all while everyone's watching and every pick is recorded. You're going to look back on those decisions in a year, and they're still going to be there. I think, 'Yeah, just please give me an easy path.'"
"I mean, obviously most of us are just fantasizing about winning the Pro Tour," Stark said. "But in terms of strategy, they're also trying to think about the people they're drafting against, what they drafted in the previous drafts, if they have preferences, and things like that. Ultimately, you're trying to draft the best deck you can and win. You're not going to do that differently in a Top 8 draft than during the Swiss portion of the Pro Tour, but you do have the specific information a day in advance of exactly who you're going to be drafting against."
Mike Turian echoed the importance of preparation. "A lot of it's about finding the common and uncommon cards that position you well in the draft, that somehow always find a way to win," Turian said. "I'd be looking for those. A lot of times they're counterintuitive. One of the Top 8 drafts for me was the Mirrodin block. We basically always played 17 lands in Limited. In that draft environment, I think I was playing 15, sometimes 14 lands. To me, it's those types of things. How do I totally flip and find a way to gain an edge this weekend? You're going to be going up against top players with top cards, so you just have to find an edge."
With the last individual Pro Tour Top 8 draft over a decade in the past, few players on the Pro Tour today have a memory of what it's like to play in this particular style of event. For Damo da Rosa, the Rise of the Eldrazi Top 8 draft at Pro Tour San Juan presented the unique challenge of integrating teammate advice that conflicted with his own gut feelings about the environment.
"That tournament was one of the first ones where we had a new team and a new dynamic. We were split between the people who played Constructed and people who drafted. I was one of the players that played Constructed a lot, and I didn't play a lot of drafts. Then, when it came to the tournament, I was talking to Ben Stark, who was one of the players that did play draft a lot. He told me that certain things that you would think were good because they're good in normal drafts aren't good for that environment. 'Removal is bad, ramp is great, and eight-mana cards are great.' That was very unintuitive to me, and I didn't quite believe him. I thought, 'This just makes no sense, so I'm just going to do what I think is best.' And I did that in the Swiss rounds, and it didn't work super well.
"Then I got to the Top 8 draft on the strength of my Constructed record because our deck was really good. I opened my first booster in the draft and had the choice between taking the card that I thought was better and the card that Ben Stark had told me to take if I was in this position. I just took the card that he told me to take, which was a very novel thing for me. It's normal to have disagreements, and people just do what they want, especially at the very high level where everyone is good. But I was convinced that he was right and I was wrong, even if I didn't fully understand why. So, I just took the card that he had said was better and it worked out.
"It was a very different tournament for me. I learned throughout the tournament that my initial position was wrong and that my teammate was right, and I was faced with that exact decision in my first pick in the Top 8 draft. It was a really big fork in the road. Do I trust myself or my teammate who is probably better at this than me? I trusted him, and it was good."
Amsterdam presents the opportunity for players to once again make the kinds of memories that might only come around once in a decade, or once in a lifetime. Viewers, too, have the chance to watch Top 8 and Limited Magic as it hasn't been seen in over ten years.
"I think drafts are very fun," Damo da Rosa said. "You only really get to see them at a high level at the Pro Tour, and usually only in the middle of the Pro Tour. It is just a very exciting way to play. You can see how different players think about the same things. You'll see a lot of people faced with the same choices, and they'll pick different things in those spots, which I always think is fascinating."
"I've been playing Magic for ... we'll just say forever, and Prereleases are the closest thing to what Magic was in its original days, and I feel like draft is right there also," Turian said. "Everybody starts out at the same point. Whatever happens in this Top 8, I really feel like the best player is going to win. To me, it is connected to my earliest days of Magic and my earliest days of competitive play. I love seeing that, and I love that you get this amazing diversity of cards. I expect the best player to win and the best cards to rise to the top. Those two things really make it fun because you just don't know what will happen. No two drafts are ever the same. That's pretty awesome."