Atlanta

The last Spotlight Series event in Atlanta brought something that’s never happened before in Magic history. It wasn’t the size of the tournament, though a ~1500 person paper standard event in 2025 is great news for Magic. It wasn’t Rei “cftsoc” Zhang making top 8 with a fiddly combo deck, that happens every weekend. No, it was a strange, never-before-seen quirk of the rules: decklists were closed during Day 1 of the event, but for Day 2 they were open!

While this rule is certainly strange, at first glance it doesn’t seem worthy of much attention, let alone an entire article. It turns out though that your preparation for a tournament should actually depend quite a bit on whether decklists are closed or open. Many choices you make throughout a match are going to be influenced by the cards your opponent could have - mulliganing, sideboarding, adding a creature to your board in the face of a sweeper, casting your big payoff into open mana, the list goes on. Those in turn should affect your deck for the tournament, both the archetype you pick and how you build it. I’ll give some specific examples to highlight what you should be thinking about in open and closed environments, then finish by trying to answer what the best strategy was for Atlanta.

PT New Phyrexia

Leading up to Pro Tour Phyrexia I had a key realization in testing. The format was Pioneer and I was testing Abzan Greasefang [decklist]. The deck was great when it reanimated Parhelion on turn 3, but not very consistent at doing that. I turned to a radical measure to solve that problem - I’d mulligan every hand that didn’t have a path to assembling Greasefang+vehicle on turn 3. That actually worked great - I started winning more! But I was also losing lots of games by mulliganing down to 3 cards. There just wasn’t enough redundancy in the Pioneer cardpool to enable this gameplan consistently. I needed a card that could let me keep more opening hands.

I cast around and landed on Witherbloom Command, a card everyone had discarded in favor of Satyr Wayfinder. Witherbloom Command had some problems- it was great in matchups where it could trade for a card- killing 1 toughness creatures against Mono-White Aggro, Llanowar Elves and Wolfwillow Haven against Mono Green, or Witch’s Oven against Sacrifice. But there were other matchups, like UW Control and Lotus Field, where it did nothing other than drain and mill. That was an unacceptable rate for two mana.

Circling back to the opening hand issue, let’s compare Witherbloom Command and Satyr Wayfinder there. A hand of 3 lands, 2 Satyr Wayfinders, Esika’s Chariot, and Skysovereign is always a mulligan - it’s too unlikely to do something powerful fast enough. Now replace those Wayfinders with Commands. Against Control, Lotus, and similar, you still have to mulligan this hand. But against Mono White, Mono Green, or Sac you now have a keep - at worst you’re interacting on 2 and 3, then playing your two vehicles, and with your mills you have outs to put a vehicle into the graveyard and find a Greasefang to reanimate it. We’ve turned a hand that was a mulligan against the entire format into one we can keep half the time, and there were a lot of hands that looked like the example above. I rode that increase in consistency all the way to a 9th place finish.

Crucial though is that the strategy I’ve outlined only works in open decklist events. If decklists were closed I wouldn’t know whether or not Witherbloom Command was a live card when making mulligan decisions. And Greasefang was able to exploit this open decklist dynamic beyond just Witherbloom Command - it could keep slower, more redundant hands vs decks like Rakdos Midrange, while mulliganing aggressively vs a less interactive deck like Lotus Field. The key was that the deck mulliganed well by virtue of needing very few resources to win.

Closed Decklists and Arena Championship qualifier

Let’s switch gears and look at a closed decklist example. Just a few months ago I played an Arena Championship qualifier. The format was Standard and the World Championship had just finished, with Gruul Aggro being the most played deck. I dutifully copied a list and started playing on the Arena ladder. I noticed something interesting: when I tapped out for some creature, my black midrange opponent would often cast their removal spell in their main phase. This guaranteed they could kill the creature safely without risking getting blown out by Snakeskin Veil, a card most of the Gruul lists played at worlds. This was annoying for me, the Gruul player. My snakeskin veils would end up rotting in my hand, with my opponent never giving me a juicy window to cast them for value. 

I tried playing the games more slowly to always have mana up to cast the veil, but that wasn’t working either. The strength of Gruul was that it could make strong curve plays that demanded removal spells from the opponent, pushing through tons of damage if the opponent ever stumbled. And even if they did have all the answers Gruul could grind through with cards like Innkeeper’s Talent and Manifold Mouse. Applying maximum pressure by spending every bit of mana was the key to winning games with Gruul. 

The natural conclusion from all this was to just cut Snakeskin Veil from the deck. So I did that! My opponents in the qualifier all mainphased their removal spells anyway, and I never drew a dead Snakeskin Veil en route to a deep day 2 finish. Important though, was that this plan only worked because of closed decklists! If my opponents never had to worry about Snakeskin Veil, they could have always saved their removal spells for my turn, and it would’ve been much harder for me to leverage my Innkeeper’s Talents and Monstrous Rages to push damage through. If you look at the decklists from Arena Championship 7, which was an open decklists even in the same format, you’ll notice many of the competitors playing a cheeky 1-of Snakeskin Veil to keep their opponents honest.

Open vs Closed

I’d conclude from these examples that there are two axes you need to consider when accounting for open/closed decklists. Greasefang was an example of how open/closed decklists can influence archetype selection. Greasefang is a great open decklists archetype for a few different reasons. It can win on few resources and thus mulligan very aggressively to react to what the opponent is doing. Witherbloom Command was an important addition to exploit that fact. Separately though, think about sideboarding with Greasefang. If your opponent has 4 Rest in Peace, you’ll want to board in a bunch of disenchant effects, move away from the most graveyard-reliant cards like Parhelion, and generally play a more midrange game postboard. If your opponent has 0 though, you’ll want to keep your primary gameplan intact. 

This extends to in-game decision making too. If your opponent has multiple copies of Go Blank, you want to preserve your graveyard enablers - not discarding a vehicle to Raffine’s Informant when you already have one in the graveyard, for example. But if your opponent instead has Unlicensed Hearse you instead want to get as many vehicles into the graveyard as possible, playing towards removing the Hearse and still having something left to reanimate after they exile two cards.

The other axis is in deck construction. In the Gruul example I was exploiting my opponents’ preconception of the format: they were used to Gruul decklists playing Snakeskin Veil, and I gained an advantage by deviating from that expectation. With Gruul I removed a card my opponents expected me to have, but often the deviation will be an additive change. I remember playing Standard Soldiers against Domain, in a format where Domain typically only played Sunfall as their sweeper. My opponent had 3 mana in play, so I thought it was safe to tap out for more pressure. They untapped and slammed Depopulate to wipe my board. I lost the game with a very embarrassing Make Disappear stuck in my hand.

With open decklists there are still deck construction choices to consider, but in the opposite direction. Any card choices you make are visible to your opponent, and you need to respect that by making your decklist as balanced as possible. What does that mean? Identifying all the decisions a matchup hinges on, and building your deck to maximize the difficulty of those decisions for your opponent. If you don’t have Snakeskin Veil in your deck, the game is much easier for your opponent to play. Once you do, they have to decide whether or not to respect it, and risk walking into a blowout or getting punished for playing too conservatively.

I hope this article gives everyone some actionable advice for making deck selection and deckbuilding decisions. If you’re deciding which deck from the Pro Tour to put together in paper for your RCQ season - ask yourself which one translates best to closed decklists. If you’ve just qualified for your first RC and are grinding the Arena ladder to practice, ask yourself whether the matches would’ve played differently if your opponent had known your whole 75 before the match. And what about where this article started- the weird half-open format in Atlanta? If you’re invested enough in Magic to slog your way through a 1500-word treatise on the nuances of open vs closed decklists, you’re probably trying very hard to qualify for the Pro Tour. In that case you want to be optimizing for crunch time on Day 2, so just pretend it’s an open decklists event and call it a day.