Jeff Zandi is a five time pro tour veteran who has been playing
Magic since 1994. Jeff is a level two DCI judge and has
been judging everything from small local tournaments
to pro tour events. Jeff is from Coppell, Texas, a suburb
of Dallas, where his upstairs game room has been the
"Guildhall", the home of the Texas Guildmages,
since the team formed in 1996. One of the original
founders of the team, Jeff Zandi is the team's
administrator, and is proud to continue the team's
tradition of having players in every pro tour from the
first event in 1996 to the present.
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The
Southwestern
Paladin
Walking to the Pro Tour:
Preparing for Pro Tour Prague
by Jeff
Zandi
March 31, 2006
If
you have never qualified for a Pro Tour, I
gotta tell you, it’s a really nice feeling.
There is nothing like showing up at the next
PTQ in your area and having people ask you,
“hey, are you playing today?” You get to
say, “Nah, I qualified last week.” It’s
pretty sweet. If you HAVE qualified for the
Pro Tour, done whatever you had to do to
travel to the Pro Tour, but never made it to
day two, I am sadly unable to complete that
picture for you. That’s because I’ve played
in five Pro Tour events over the years, and
I haven’t made it to day two yet, either. I
don’t know how it feels to play on a Pro
Tour Saturday, racing towards a top 64
payday. However, I know there IS hope. The
Pro Tour payoff, Magic’s ultimate prize, is
out there, it is a dream but it is a
POSSIBLE dream. Like any other worthy goal,
it’s all a matter of steps, just a matter of
putting one foot in front of the other.
Lately, my Ravnica/Ravnica/Guildpact draft
skills have been just terrible. But there is
still time, one month between me and Prague,
and you have to walk before you can run, so
if I have to walk to the Czech Republic, if
I have to get bashed in twenty booster
drafts in a row in order to learn something
that can help me at the Pro Tour, then so be
it!
STEP ONE – WIN A PTQ
I judge three or four PTQs each season, so I
don’t get the opportunity to play in nearly
as many qualifiers as I used to. This
season, I was fortunate enough to play in
two, a 91 player PTQ in Houston in January,
and a tidy 51 player PTQ in Lubbock in
February. In Houston, I messed up a
perfectly decent green/white/black deck
trying to force blue into my deck to
accommodate a pair of Mark of Evictions.
This effort was ultimately unsuccessful. A
month later in Lubbock, I played a
black/white/blue deck with no color helpers
but went undefeated with some good play and
some GREAT card draws. I walked away from
Lubbock with a PTQ win, with my seat at
PT-Prague assured but my draft abilities
completely in question. Step one, win a PTQ…CZECH!
STEP TWO – MAKE YOUR TRAVEL PLANS
Starting with the Pro Tour Honolulu season,
Wizards no longer writes checks to the
winners of Pro Tour Qualifiers. Nowadays,
when you win a PTQ, you are awarded a travel
voucher good for a round trip plane ticket
to wherever your Pro Tour is being played.
In reality, it’s not quite THAT easy. When
you win a PTQ, the tournament organizer
should put a letter in your hand detailing
the hoops that you must jump through in
order to receive your travel voucher. You
find out that you need to download a consent
form, which basically explains what WOTC
might and might not ever owe you, all the
way from the plane ticket you need right now
all the way to winning first place at a Pro
Tour. You sign your name on the dotted line
and ship this document back to WOTC (along
with some updated tax info about yourself so
that you can pay your taxes later on). Then
you wait for an email that will tell you
that you are officially on THE LIST and that
you are now cleared for arranging your
travel through the Hasbro (they ate our
favorite collectible card game company a few
years ago, so go buy some of their stock
already!) corporate travel office. I won my
PTQ on February 18th, I fax all my forms to
WOTC on Monday, February 27th. I never get
the email discussed on THEIR instruction
sheet. I wait a week. I wait two weeks. In
the meantime, ticket prices for round trip
tickets to Prague are steadily rising, which
is what airline tickets do as the date of
travel becomes closer.
I contact WOTC, specifically, the great and
powerful Andy Heckt. Andy sends me back an
email telling me that they don’t have my
paperwork. I send them another copy of
everything. A few more days go by, and this
time, WOTC tells me that they have
everything except a photocopy of my driver’s
license to prove that I am at least eighteen
years old. I’m the oldest guy on the Pro
Tour (is Chicago’s Bob Wagner still alive?)
and the DCI is CARDING ME! No biggie, I take
a deep breath and promptly fax a photocopy
of my driver’s license, along with another
copy of all my pertinent documentation
(things I have already faxed them two times
before) last Friday, one week ago today.
On Monday, I still don’t have an email
telling me that I can book travel, so I take
the initiative and call Hasbro Travel
Services. A friendly and helpful Colleen, a
very colorful character on the phone with
her pronounced New York City accent, tells
me that I am officially on the list. She
lines up my travel and uses my credit card
number to buy an additional ticket for my
wife, Willa, who is traveling to Prague with
me. Colleen and I discuss at least three
different potential travel itineraries, and
she accommodates my desired departure and
arrival dates and times. The whole process
takes less than fifteen minutes. The next
day, I have official emails verifying me and
my wife’s travel plans. The lesson here is
to BE VIGILANT. WOTC’s Andy Heckt and Tom Ko
are very good guys, but they have hundreds
of players to collect information from, and
they have responsibilities other than just
making sure I get my travel arranged. Just
don’t give up. Now, if I could just figure
out what hotel to stay in…
STEP THREE – GET YOUR GAME ON, AND ON, AND
ON…
Over this past weekend, I lost six drafts in
a row on Magic Online, all in the first
round! Very depressing. Losing is not cool,
and if you lose TOO often, you can good at
losing, which you never want to do. Losing
gets to be like a stink that you can’t wash
off. Since I haven’t really put all this
losing business behind me yet, I can’t say
that I have a good remedy. I do think that
if you feel like you are just beating your
head against the wall, and have lost in the
first round of three booster drafts in the
short space of a single afternoon, you might
need to get away from Magic for a few hours
and DO SOMETHING ELSE. Go to the movies,
kiss a pretty girl, have some punch and pie.
Just do ANYTHING that isn’t Magic for just a
little while. If you are completely
frustrated, playing in another booster draft
with your head in the wrong place is just a
waste of your time and precious online
booster packs.
Tuesday night is our regular weekly
practice, where actual Magic players leave
their computers or their local game stores
to travel all the way to my house to play
Magic IN PERSON for 5-8 hours. This last
Tuesday, weekly Guildmage Practice number
448, we had eight players by seven o’clock
on the nose, something that hardly ever
happens. We were just about to begin when
Trent Boneau (really good at limited,
obviously one of the best Magic players with
a PhD in the world) called and said he was
just a few minutes away. Trent is one of
those guys who you will hold a draft for,
even if the draft already has eight players
in it. Sure enough, Trent is in the door
five minutes later and we go ahead and draft
with the totally unstable number of nine
players. Before we finish the first pack of
Ravnica, another really good Texas player
has shown up sad and grumpy, Mark
Hendrickson. It’s a pretty serious draft,
everyone here plays a lot, Arthur Morris is
back from playing in PT-Honolulu a few weeks
ago, Mason Peatross has Pro Tour experience,
Hunter Burton is willing to travel anywhere
to get into another Grand Prix or to hang
out and draft at a Pro Tour. The guest of
honor tonight is none other than Gabe
“Sugar” Walls. Gabe came back to Dallas with
Neil Reeves after the two of them each
finished in the money in last Saturday’s
professional Marvel Vs. event in Atlanta.
Gabe plans on hanging out with Neil and game
for a few days before returning home to
Indy. Gabe and Neil are slummin’ it tonight
with us wannabes. It’s a good draft, we play
three rounds of Swiss just to get the
maximum play out of our draft decks. In the
end, the final four is Gabe over Neil in a
nail-biter and Hunter over Arthur in a
battle of quantity over quality of
creatures. Gabe and Hunter split the prizes
in the finals, more a less a rule on Tuesday
nights in the Guildhall so that we can get
on to another draft. Gabe and Hunter decide
to flip all the rares and foils drafted face
down and PLAY THE GAME. In case you don’t
know, the game is played like this: each
player picks a face down card and flips it
over, the card with the higher casting cost
is the winner, and the winner gets both face
up cards for keeps. If two cards are flipped
with the same casting cost, another pair of
cards is flipped up to decide the winner of
all four cards. And so on. About mid way
through the rares, Gabe flips up the draft’s
only real prize, a Watery Grave, which is
also the NUT LOW in this particular game.
Hunter wins the Watery Grave by flipping
over some terrible rare that costs a lot.
Gabe’s pile still ends up containing a
Loxodon Hierarch and some other winners. All
in a days work for one of the Pro Tour’s
best players.
A second draft never materializes, but Neil
and Gabe and I all end up this faux English
pub in Dallas called The Fox and the Hound
where we meet up with Adam Bernstein (won a
Vs. professional event last year, also
doesn’t suck at Magic, also looks like a
young George Clooney, also has a New York
Yankees tattoo on his forearm) and his
roommate and former gamer buddy Scotty. We
all yuk it up and have drinks and fried
cheese and randomly palaver each other while
we play darts and wait for the shuffle board
table to free up, which it never does.
Besides being very good at Magic, Gabe
Walls, who I’d never seen much of before, is
an incredibly nice guy. I wouldn’t say the
fella was cocky, but I would say this 22
year old is very comfortable in his own
skin. Gabe won’t like this, but I think he
looks a lot like Randy, Jason Lee’s
slow-witted brother on My Name is Earl. I
didn’t say Gabe was slow-witted, Gabe is
incredibly sharp and seems to be good at
everything he puts his mind toward. Your
basic golden boy, any way you want to cut
it. He’s arguing with Neil about the nature
of the man/woman dynamic, and it is not
going particularly well for Walls when I
interrupt, trying to pick upsome nuggets of
insight about Rav/Rav/Gpact booster draft.
In retrospect, I know I came off
oh-so-needy. That might be because I am, in
fact, INCREDIBLY NEEDY where it comes to
current draft technology. There I am beating
down Gabe with this draft theory and that
draft theory, Gabe and Neil both put up with
me for about as long as possible, before
Gabe puts in all in a nutshell. These are
almost his exact words: “You have no chance
of making day two if you don’t draft five
times a day in the 8-4 room (on Magic
Online).” He said it wasn’t necessarily
important to win these drafts, but that I
better be learning something from every
draft. That’s pretty much all he had to say
about it.
Some guys would be insulted. Some guys would
come back with how they can’t make that kind
of commitment. You know, jobs, kids, family,
I know all the excuses. I’ve made ‘em all
myself. But see, Gabe didn’t ask me for my
life story, he just laid it out the way that
he genuinely sees it. You gotta respect
that. Anyone remember this old rap lyric
from the Eighties? “…the next time someone’s
teachin’, why don’t you get taught?” If you
like that pop reference, then you’ll LOVE
this one, from a fairly popular 1999 film,
“There’s a difference between knowing the
path, and walking the path.” I realize there
are better sources for gaining personal
perspective than rap music and sci fi
movies, but these are difficult times, and I
guess we all have to try to gain some wisdom
from just about anywhere we can find it. My
fortune cookie last Friday proclaimed, “wise
men learn more from fools than fools learn
from the wise.” When it comes to drafting,
Gabe Walls is no fool. So I’ll tell you
where I’ve been four times today, I’ve been
camping out in the 8-4 Rav/Rav/Gpact draft
queue on Magic Online. I’m not afraid to
lose, not as long as there is a way to learn
something and to get better.
I’m taking ALL suggestions and good advice.
It’s a long way to Prague, and right now, it
looks like I’m gonna have to walk the whole
way!
Jeff Zandi
Texas Guildmages
Level II DCI Judge
jeffzandi@hotmail.com
Zanman on Magic Online
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