The Competitive Magic Season

First of all, Happy New Year! I know it's a bit late, but I haven't written in awhile. Truth be told, the holiday season and other real life happenings sort of knocked the wind out of Team DOTS, at least in terms of attending any tournaments. Last Friday was actually the first time I even attended a local event since before Christmas.

Furthermore, we don't really have plans to attend any major tournaments until February, or at least I don't, so I figured I would take this time to lay down some knowledge on our readers here about the competitive season cycle for tournament Magic. This can get a little bit complicated, especially if you're a non-player, so just bear with me.

The first thing I'm going to explain are formats. There are two basic types of formats: Constructed and Limited. Constructed has five sub-categories or formats (Block, Standard, Extended, Legacy, and Vintage) while Limited has two (Sealed and Draft). The basic difference between the two is that in Constructed players are required to provide their own decks that they have already built, whereas in Limited players are provided with packs of cards that they build their deck out of.

The Constructed sub-categories basically determine which cards you are allowed to put into your deck, while the Limited sub-categories determine how you go about acquiring cards to build your deck. I'm not going to go into detail about Limited right now, as Constructed is more my field of interested, and in major Limited events players are generally required to be proficient in both Sealed and Draft, where Constructed events limit themselves to one sub-category per tournament.

Which format is played during competitive Magic play is determined by the release cycle of sets. These days there are sets released in October, February, April, and July each year. The Limited season runs from October until January. From January until April is Extended season. And April until roughly mid-summer is Standard season. This means that most major tournaments that fall within those time frames will be of the assigned format. I think I should note that most 5K tournaments are either Standard or Legacy format regardless of what the competitive season is.

I'm not going to go into great detail about what sort of cards are allowed in each Constructed format, but Extended allows players access to a lot more cards than Standard does. This means that the meta-games in each format are very different. For instance, Jund, the most powerful deck in Standard, is not a viable deck in Extended because there are more cards available and thus more decks that can stop it.

It is now Extended season, and we of Team DOTS are starting to consider what decks we would like to play in that format and beginning to test with them. Starting in February there are several Pro-Tour Qualifiers (or PTQs as we call them) in nearby cities. The Pro-Tour is the most prestigious of Magic competitions, though not necessarily the best paying, and players are required to have invitations to them, which are obtained by playing in PTQs or by being a strong enough player that you are simply invited to attend.

Team DOTS is hoping to place a member into at least the Top 8 of a PTQ in the coming months, and I will certainly let you know if we achieve that goal. In the meantime, since there likely won't be any tournaments to report, I'll be trying to give all of you lovely readers a better feel of just how this game works.


Upcoming: TBA! [being a.) a breakdown of Competitive Vs. Casual Magic, b.) an analysis of my new Standard deck, or c.) an analysis of Extended testing and the meta]


Check us out at: https://sites.google.com/site/teamdamageonthestack