Cutter Otters Addendum: Tournament Report

05/13/2024

Last weekend, I played Cutter Otters at RC Minneapolis. At the time of writing my article, I felt pretty good about the deck! But unfortunately, I only went 2-4 with the deck at the RC, not even making day 2.

So what went wrong? Was it just variance? Was the deck worse than I thought? What did I get right and what did I get wrong?

One of the most difficult parts of Magic comes in interpreting results. Tournament results are always such small sample sizes, especially if you do poorly; but at the same time, dismissing everything as pure variance is a good way to never learn anything.

If you ask me what my gut feeling was right after day 1, I would say that I felt I got a little bit varianced. I felt like I drew poorly and mulliganed more than expected. But gut feelings are impossible to quantify or prove, and very likely to be rife with bias - I did poorly, so my brain naturally wants to assume that my variance was bad overall. Because I did poorly, it's quite possible I'm focusing on the negative and ignoring the positive - for instance, I also won 5 out of 6 die rolls!

So overall, I don't think "I got varianced" is a satisfying answer to why I did poorly. It might be a small part of the answer, but it's not all that useful. So, is there anything else useful to glean?

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Well, one thing I can say is that, while I was quite happy registering Otters a week before the RC, as I was writing my article; in the week between then and the RC I started getting higher on Prowess again.

In the past, I had been lower on Prowess, as I thought it had the issue of lacking strong threats and interaction when it didn't draw

Cori-Steel Cutter; Slickshot Show-Off was fine and certainly fit into the deck, but had its own issues. But after I started seeing lists adopt Drake Hatcher and more copies of Into the Flood Maw, those concerns subsided.

To make matters worse, Hatcher and Floodmaw not only made Prowess better generically in my eyes; they also made the deck specifically much stronger against Otters itself. Floodmaw providing a huge tempo swing when targeting Vitality gave Prowess a good fraction more starts that Otters struggled to keep up with; and Hatcher was much an order of magnitude harder to remove than Slickshot, as it didn't cleanly die to anything except ocassionally Bushwhack.

So while I still had confidence in Otters' ability to tangle against the rest of the metagame, in the week leading up to the RC I became both more concerned about the Prowess matchup, and more worried that Prowess had just become too strong of a deck in its own right to justify registering anything else.

Unfortunately, the time I had for the tournament was fairly limited - I barely had any time to play Magic outside of my regular streams with cftsoc. So even while I started regretting my choice of deck, I couldn't really justify trying to switch last-minute; it would've involved too many logistics of figuring out a good exact list and sourcing cards. The best I could to was to add some copies of Drake Hatcher to my own deck, to try to fight fire with fire, so to speak.

And ultimately, I think my fears came to fruition at the tournament itself. I faced Prowess 3 times, and lost all three times. They were mostly fairly close games, but the cards I was afraid of - Hatcher and Floodmaw - played a substantial part in the losses. And again, three matches are an abysmal sample size - but you have to work with what you've got.

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So overall, where does that leave us? Well, I still think Otters isn't a bad deck, per se. It does powerful things, and has good matchups into every deck in the format that isn't Prowess (well, plus the mono-red matchup being close to a coinflip). I stand by registering it over almost every deck, and would do so again despite going 2-4...

...except for the fact that the Prowess deck exists. Unfortunately, I don't think I can recommend registering anything but Prowess at this point, until something changes. Hopefully something will before the next PT a month from now.