I have a special treat for you guys this week. A few days ago, I had the opportunity to chat with Pro Tour: Avacyn Restored champion Alex Hayne. I’ve provided a couple easy ways to listen to the whole interview, including the following YouTube video, and you can also check out the text version below.

Nassim Ketita: Hello everyone, and welcome to the show. I’m your host Big Nass, and I have with me none other than Pro Tour: Avacyn Restored champion Alex Hayne. Hailing from beautiful Montreal, Canada, he’s been touted as Canada’s next big thing. He first came to the world’s attention in his own backyard, where he lost to fellow Canadian Richard Hoaen in the finals of Grand Prix: Montreal. That earned him an invite to the 2011 World Championships, where he finished in fifty-sixth place. After a disappointing showing at Pro Tour: Dark Ascension in Honolulu, Alex cashed in his Pro Players Club invite to go to Barcelona, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself, Alex?

NK: What would you say is the main key to your success?

AH: Never giving up; always try to become better. Don’t judge yourself by other people—as long as you are better than you were yesterday. That’s my goal.

NK: So for most people, when they need to go to another continent, they get on this wondrous invention called an aeroplane. You had some different ideas there.

AH: Normally for Pro Tours, we gather at a house or a hotel for the week before. [David] Caplan had the idea instead to take a cruise across because the cost was similar. We’d all be in one location with food and lodging provided, and we could test. Both Caplan and I had Level 3 invites and didn’t have flights. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out for the other Canadians because they had flights with their invites. So basically, it was just Caplan and I. We had a blast. Relaxing a lot, playing various games, and of course testing for the Pro Tour.

AH: Yeah, it was on the ship. We were trying all sorts of things, and one was, “What happens if we push miracles to the extreme and just jam as many miracles as possible?” Whenever you draw a spell, it’d be a miracle spell if all your spells are miracles. Your odds of drawing a miracle are way bigger if you have more of them. It’s an idea I think other people tried; it was finding the utility cards to support it—like Feeling of Dread—that were really key.

NK: From watching your matches, it looked like Feeling of Dread was a very important card for you.

AH: It was huge. The more you play the deck, the more you realize that mulliganing aggressively for Feeling of Dread is among the big things—it just buys you so much time. The more turns you buy, the more draw steps you see and the more chances you have to hit a miracle.

NK: Who else played the deck, and how did they end up doing?

AH: There were fourteen of us in the team, and only two people didn’t play the deck. I don’t think anyone else finished in the money. I think Doug Potter was playing the last round for money, and I think Dan Lanthier was close. The deck didn’t do great for most people. No one other than I did that well on Day 2. It was definitely a very challenging deck to play, and I think part of our results in playtesting when it was crushing everything were skewed by the fact that you have the time to decide on your plays, and you have people watching you to make sure you make the right one.

NK: For those people out there playing Block Constructed tournaments on Magic Online, would you recommend this deck for them?

AH: Probably not, but if you were to play this deck, I’d recommend the updated version that ChannelFireball played at GP: Anaheim. Our version was hedging its bets against an open field; it was a format that was less defined. Take Devastation Tide for instance. We didn’t know what planeswalkers and other things people would play, and it’s kind of a catch-all, whereas now the format is more defined, and Rolling Temblor is definitely better.

NK: After five rounds, you were sitting at a 2–3 record, which meant that you would have to 3–0 the first Draft to stay alive. Were you nervous sitting at that Draft table?

AH: Not really; I felt very confident about Draft. At 1–3, I was feeling pretty bad. We spent all this time working on it [the Miracles deck], and I was just tired and wanted to go back to the hotel, but I just kept playing anyway. We’ve done a lot of Drafts in the format, and I had always been doing well in them.

AH: I kind of thought that it was not possible for me to win the tournament at that point. I was hoping to make Top 75 to lock up Gold or maybe make Top 25 and receive a flight for the next Pro Tour and be the top Canadian on Pro Points for the World Magic Cup. I needed to win five more out of the next eight to make Gold—that was the goal.

NK: A lot of successful tournament players will tell you that other than the finals, the most stressful round is the win-and-in. For Barcelona, that was Round 15. A win here means you can comfortably draw into the Top 8 the following round. Tell me about the match you had against Henry Romero.

AH: I didn’t know it was win-and-in. Looking at the standings, I had the worst tiebreakers, which kind of made sense since I started 1–3. I was paired down against Romero, and if [no one drew], I’d be paired down again in the last round, so I’d be unable to draw in. What happened is that two people drew, so there was an extra spot for me to draw in safely.

He was playing Angel of Glory's Rise reanimator, a deck Travis Woo came up with. That was probably our best matchup possible; it was really hard for us to lose. It’s a super-slow midrange deck, and the miracles deck exceeded it by going over the tops of those types of decks.

AH: Game 1, I steamrolled him, but Game 2, he had interesting tech for the sideboard: Triumph of Cruelty. Effectively, I had to discard a card on each of his upkeeps. That was pretty good, but the thing with the miracles deck is that it doesn’t really need to have a hand. Whenever you draw an Entreat the Angels, you just win. It’s effectively an Entreat combo deck. The whole point of the deck is to buy yourself enough time until you draw an Entreat, and you win. None of the decks in the format could deal with it. People were cutting Sever the Bloodline from their decks for Bonfire of the Damned. While a miracled Bonfire deals with it, its requiring 9 mana to deal with it without miracle usually meant that player just died when you cast Entreat. I bought time against the Triumph and swept the board a couple times, drew Entreat, and killed him.

NK: They announced the Top 8, and then you found out who your opponent would be: Jon Finkel. What was that like?

AH: I was very excited, actually. I wanted to play against Jon. One of the reasons I play Magic is to see how far I can go, and Jon is considered by many to be the best player ever in the game. That’s the type of person I want to play against. Basically: Learn and become better. How many times do you get to play against Jon Finkel in the Top 8 of a Pro Tour? I had already locked up Platinum and top Canadian pro, so the only other thing I could gain besides money—which is nice but isn’t the most important thing—was the first-place prize of being invited to the Player Championships.

NK: I want to talk about Game 4 against Finkel for a second. He’s at 16; you have Geist of Saint Traft, Snapcaster Mage, and Tamiyo, the Moon Sage in play. You attacked before drawing cards with Tamiyo. What was that all about?

NK: Of course I’m not going to let you walk out of here without talking about Game 5 against Finkel. If you guys aren’t aware, Alex sideboarded an incorrect number of cards and presented an illegal deck. He called a judge to resolve the situation, and Finkel said he was fine with proceeding with the game. The typical penalty for this sort of thing is a game loss, but the head judge allowed Alex to fix his deck and continue with no penalty. Your heart must have been beating out through your chest. Tell me what was going through your mind at that moment.

AH: I sideboarded, and then we were just chatting. I was shuffling and was planning on removing the cards, but I forgot and presented. Wait, did I remember to take those cards out? I looked in my deck box, and there were only ten cards looking back at me. Oh no! I called the judge on myself and told him that I presented a sixty-five-card deck. Okay, I guess this is the way it ends. I didn’t want that to happen, but I just thought: Well, it’s how it is. Very good sportsmanship from Jon, and I have the utmost respect for him, but his call didn’t actually do anything. It’s not a procedure where your opponent gets to decide whether you receive a game loss.

NK: I think that’s a common misconception that Finkel let you have it. I don’t think his comment really swayed the judge’s decision all that much.

NK: Do you have a favorite story from the tournament?

AH: The rest of the team was just awesome the whole time. It was awesome testing with them, preparing for the event. We had lots and lots of fun. The fact that they let me sleep Saturday night while they stayed up the whole night testing the matchup for me was just incredible. The support there and everybody back home. The whole Canadian Magic community was rooting for me, and it was just awesome. I felt that I couldn’t let them down—I had to win. My favorite moment was right after I won, and everybody was there, and they were all singing Hallelujah. Very poorly. But hey, they’re pro Magic players, not pro singers.

NK: Rookie of the Year, Pro Tour Winner, and Canadian National Team Captain. What’s next for Alex Hayne?

AH: I’m planning to go to GP: Vancouver, so if anybody is going to be there, I’d be glad to say “hi.” I plan to keep playing and trying to improve. I’m really looking forward to the Player Championship, where I get to play against all the best players in the world—and of course, the World Magic Cup. I’m glad to have Lucas Siow on my team; he won the recent qualifier. There’s one in Calgary this weekend [this past weekend by the time you guys are reading this], and I hope somebody else awesome gets to join us on the team. I’m excited for that.

Well, there you have it folks. I want to thank Alex for agreeing to be interviewed, and I wish him good luck at the Player Championship and the World Magic Cup. You can follow him on Twitter at @insaynehayne, and you can check out his articles on ManaDeprived.com.

Until next time, take care.

Nassim Ketita

www.youtube.com/nketita

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