Sebastiano Gabrielli

Today I want to go a little deeper into my thinking behind the Mono Black list I posted without Mishra's Factory. First, I would like to explain how I approach a big tournament. For deck choice, I look at the current metagame and the most popular decks at the moment. I combine that with whatever knowledge I have about the players attending the event and the geographical area in which I will be playing. From there, I pick a deck based on my golden rule: it needs to have a decent matchup against at least three Tier 1 decks. Then I try to make an even more precise metagame prediction and tune the list based on that. For this EPM, I'm expecting Stiflenought to still be the public enemy number one, Replenish to have very good results, a couple of Enchantress players to be near the top of the standings, and Oath Ponza to be quite popular since it can prey on fair strategies and Enchantress. So what does this mean for Mono Black? Basically, I think there will be a lot of incidental copies of Tsabo's Web between the maindeck and sideboard of the most played decks, and I don't want Mishra's Factory to get "casually" stuck under it and give up percentage points against matchups I consider favorable. Plus, cutting Mishra's Factory gives me the option to play Tsabo's Web as well, and we all know how good that card is in the right matchups, especially when it comes out of a deck your opponent doesn't expect to have access to it. Obviously, cutting Mishra's Factory means we do lose some points against aggressive strategies, and we have much less reach and ability to mitigate flood. Althought we do gain some consistency in the manabase and better sequencing during the first few turns, when you are almost guaranteed to have all the black mana you want. To mitigate those losses from the Factory cut, I figured I wanted to be as aggressive as I can and lean much harder into BB two drops, which I think are very well positioned in a metagame full of white removal like StP and Parallax Wave. I still think Mishra's Factory is the best manland in Premodern, but based on my current prediction, I think this might be a very solid configuration for EPM this Sunday! #PremodernMTG

Mono black players! Game 3 vs Replenish on the draw (they mull to 6), would you keep this hand and why? I'll post my decision later