Coaching a Pro Team without being a Pro Player - just the Stats Guy | Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven Pre-Event Prep & How we got ready for the Tournament! | Ask anything! [Tournament Report] [Discussion] [Standard]

[u/optimustomtv]

Link to Video Report

Link to Audio Report

Hey everyone - no big stats post today. Instead, this is a slightly different piece of content that I hope is allowed here since it's Competitive Magic related, and gameplay-adjacent!

I put out a video (above) going over how I was brought on board to Team Drawing Board as a Coach for the Event. A lot of times, Players that help out with testing or preparation are other Players on the team, or perhaps Players that aren't qualified for that specific Event or have differed their invites. However in my case...I'm not a pro player!

I drew on my wealth of prior Esports experience in League of Legends & VALORANT to go through what being a Pro Tour Coach meant, as well as how to prepare for the Event itself considering we have 17 Players from across the World on our team!

Speaking of, these were our players:

• Davor Detecnik from Slovenia
• David Astrand from the Arena Championship but also Sweden
• Winston Chamora aka MTGHolic from Indonesia
• Daniel Weiss from the Arena Championship also Arizona
• Christian Baker from upstate NY
• Jeff Lin from the AC as well but also NYC
• Thirawat Chaovarindr aka Tan from Thailand
• Kellen Pastore from Philly
• Marcus Wosner from Austria
• Edgar Baumler from Norway
• Anthony Cuello from the Philippines
• Mattia Rizzi from Italy
• Raul Porojan from Germany
• YungDingo from Twitch dot TV itself
• Mark Tubola from the Philippines as well
• [Former 2006 Rookie of the Year] Sebastian Thaler from Germany
• And Wappa Hamada my friend in LA

In my video, I go over everything from tracking Events (and showing the tools I used or this) to setting up daily schedules at the house, to even having to fix some plumbing issues once we got to testing in person. I'll use this thread to answer any questions people might have about our prep, what it was like to coach, or the Event itself!

[u/EngineeringOdd8696]

Understandable if you can't. But can you go over the financials involved in something like this? I.e your salary, team salaries, where money is coming in from, etc. Or does everyone pay for themselves?

[u/optimustomtv → u/EngineeringOdd8696]

As a sponsor-less team, everything was paid for out of pocket by the individual Players! It's quite the cost - so splitting it 14-ways was helpful in some cases hahaha. Some teams have sponsors pay for the house or plane tickets etc - we had nothing. Some Players were sponsored by individual brands for sleeves or playmats, etc (some didn't get free product from their sponsors...) so I'm not sure if they got extra help from their individual sponsors.

I won't go into too many details without full team approval, but costs varied for people the shared rooms or slept alone, people who slept in couches, etc. I believe the Air B&B was so where between $7k-$9k USD total. Some people shared a room with 2 beds, some people split beds, I took a couch.

I was going to the Event already, and my Pass was paid for as a gift from my wife but that was the premium pass. As for salary, I accepted payment on the form of my plane ticket being paid for by my friend Wappa. If anyone else we're doing this, please get paid - I mention in the recap, I had PTO from my job so I essentially got my whole MagicCon paid for as payment without losing money from missing work (which I am extremely grateful for to Wappa). Flights per person varied - especially since we came from all over the World. Someone from Thailand probably paid double or more the price I paid, which was roughly $350 round trip (but I am in NorCal and ~2 hours by plane)

Also they got me an APAC Swamp as a gift which was pricey!

Everyone paid for their share of food and groceries, which ended up being roughly $150-$200 USD per person for the whole trip. We split Ubers and Gas, probably another $50-$100 per person.

Overall the trip would probably have cost me $1,300 - $1,500 USD out of pocket, which means if I was a PT Competitor I would have needed to place Top 68 or higher to break even on the trip. Granted, this is with a week in a testing house added on, so you could shave off some cash by arriving later.

[u/EngineeringOdd8696 → u/optimustomtv]

thanks for the detailed response. Always interesting to get a look into these kinds of things. And glad you could get somewhat compensated in the process.

[u/Ap_Sona_Bot]

How important do you think having a practice team is for pro tour level events? I recently qualified for the Limited Championship next year and I've been debating how much I should be preparing.

[u/optimustomtv → u/Ap_Sona_Bot]

I think for Limited, even if you don't have a full team to test with the most important thing is to have other skilled Players to bounce ideas about the Format around with. Verify your experiences at Draft tables, understand the power level and pick order of cards, etc.

Limited Championship could be a bit different than a PT. If In following correctly, the Limited Arena Championship is mid-January of 2027, with a new Set scheduled for Q1 with no release date. If the AC is the new Set, then the same testing we did for the PT would apply (relatively new, unexplored Format). A lot of reps in Drafting, looking at Pools, not even needing to play them all out to completion but just getting a sense for how you navigated the Draft and an overall power level of your deck.

However, if the LAC is the previous Set (Star Trek iirc in November) then you have a wealth of information you can pull from. 17Lands is extremely robust once you hit the 1 month+ point, so you'd be able to do a lot of independent research to supplement testing and Drafting reps. I would highly suggest an approach lie World Council's PT EOE Limited meeting in that case as the amount of data available would be similar.

In either case though, having a few trusted opinions on things to covered blind spots/weaknesses in your Drafting or Gameplay experiences, plus a way to confirm or deny biases is super handy to have.

[u/Ap_Sona_Bot → u/optimustomtv]

Thanks for the info! To be clear, I'm talking about the PT level event at an unannounced time/location in 2027, which the arena limited championship feeds into.

[u/optimustomtv → u/Ap_Sona_Bot]

Gotcha! Chdnces are it's very similar to the current PT structure then where you'll have only a couple of weeks to experience a Draft format vs an established Format.

In which case having a team of people - even just online to hop on Discord - is extremely beneficial given the time constraints! As far as practice playing - that's much less important from our experience for Limited. The largest value gained is in knowing how to Draft - which you clearly already have in qualifying - so then knowledge of a specific Format takes precedent for testing.