So.
I'm back from the Dutchie Champs.
I went 4-4 with Gifts, playing the same list as Michael Heiduk aka Blitzbold (
find it and his report here).
What happen? Someone set up us the bomb. Or rather, I lost the first two rounds to Leon Kuster aka Limbo on TMD with GOAT, and to a tiny German with Stax. Both were full powered, and I could have at least forced the draw against the Stax player if I had had a second Rebuild in the board, but it is all moot because I lost. I was out of contention for the T8. Big frowns, but I guess I could have played better. I just didn't have enough practice under tournament conditions, apparently. Or maybe they just had the better draws – I know that was the case against Limbo.
However, you know you played to much Magic when you still keep playing for fun after not in contention for T8 anymore, so I obviously played through.
(You can skip the next part, which details my abyssmal performance and tells you about two incredible failures, until you get to the social stuff! It's marked like this: ---- . Before you do, check out these T8 prizes we were playing for:
T-Shirts and Gemstone Mines and 24 boosters for each T8 competitor, plus 2 FoW for 8th-5th, an LoA for 4th, a Mana Drain for 3rd, a Mox Jet for 2nd, a Lotus and a Jester's Cap art pring for 1st. The eight cards in the upper right hand corner are the prizes for the eight top-placed unpowered players.-------------------------------------
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I won the next two rounds easily against unpowered Dragon und powered WW/u (yep, Savannah Lions + Jitte). Then I played against powered Goblins, where I used up all my luck for the weekend. I killed him with a 2nd turn Colossus in the first game. So far, no story! But in the second game I held this hand: Brainstorm, Merchant Scroll, Force of Will, Ancestral, Pyroclasm, Gifts Ungiven, Island. Yep, one Island, nothing else! Since I was out anyway, I figured I could hold this, although it is a sure mulligan. So I lost, right? Holy Pikula! He never saw a Piledriver, and only got me down to seven when I topdecked a Lotus Petal after drawing a ton of irrelevent cards and no mana for many turns. My board at that point was: Pithing Needle naming Siege-Gang Commander, Island. His board was: three or four mountains, six Goblins and three Piledriver tokens.
Boom! goes the Pyroclasm, and I am stuck with one Island again. He says "go" with no play a couple of turns and eventually rebuilds with Goblin Matron and Piledriver. So I naturally draw Pyroclasm followed Black Lotus and proceed to wipe him out again, already having the Mox Pearl that enabled the Tinker I was holding. I won with Island, Colossus in play.
Meanwhile, Pyromaniac is still beating down with Ravagers, which looks like this:
The endorphines streaming through my intricate mind had a minor drawback, though: They killed my ability to read. So I go up to the pairings board for round 6 and look at my name, and my table number is 23 – or so I think. I find the table, find my opponent, ask for his name and find nothing strange. Then the matchslip comes. One look tells me: I'm not on it! So I call a judge. Turns out I should have played at table 26 (which was behind me), and because I didn't show up I get a matchloss, naturally. You might wonder: What happened to my opponent's actual opponent? Well, he was 30 minutes late into the round and showed up at about the time I discovered my stupidity. Had he been there... I am at fault, too, but still, had he been there... He got a matchloss, too, and becomes my next round's opponent. We have to be paired by hand, since the judges already registered our results as "not appeared" and autmatically dropped us both.
Revenge! That's what I can execute, by slaying this impertinent mongrel with ease and satisfaction. He is playing Landstill with only 4 Factories and 1 Faerie Conclave as win conditions. The first game culminates in me playing a gigantic Will, including replaying a Duress I had wished for earlier. I look at his hand and see: double Stifle, Mana Drain, another double card, so I take the Mana Drain
without looking closely at the two cards I didn't recognize. Turns out they were two Chains of Vapor. Would you believe me when I tell you that I had never seen a Chain of Vapor before? Neither would I, but I cannot remember when I ever saw one. I don't think I own any, too.
So for savage ownage, Tinker gets Colossus which gets bounced to my hand, and I go bash my head against the nearest metaphorical wall. I lose the next game to frustration. At this point, I am 3-4 and seriously contemplating telling nobody about this mistake. It's too entertaining a story to leave it out, though, and soon I start laughing with the others. In a lightened mood, I proceed to kill my round 8 opponent once with hard-cast Colossus and once with the Tendrils kill. He brought an unpowered black-white The Rack/Chains of Mephistopheles-deck with Hyppies, Swords to Plowshares and Planar Void maindeck, which is SLOOOOOW, and Chains do nothing against Gifts Ungiven.
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4-4. Less than I expected. Life can be so unsporting sometimes.
We go to McDonalds to have some dinner with the Dutchies, which is just plain fun. If you ever get a chance to go out with Dutchies for real, do it. They already rock the McD's, just imagine them conquering a Hard Rock Café! Also, Rudy said to me "you are so random", which from the mouth of a Dutchie surely is a strong compliment... right? Oh yeah, and the manager behind the counter at McD's somehow notices we are Magic players (I wonder how?), and while ordering my menu I hear him saying "Ik spelle mein swarze Lotus". I immediately conclude: Bram is secretly placing parts of his Clearly Occult Cult Kommando in strategically important places and will soon be informed about the movement of every single Vintage player worldwide. Watch out for the words "de swartze Lotus"! You hear those words, you run. Or you stand, fight, lose and fall under Dutch dominion. Look how Don Bram deals out orders even just before a tournament:
Don BramOn the train back to Tilburg, Rudy (rvs, 5-3), Richard (RichardD, judge), Michael (Blitzbold, 6-2) and me (Dozer) joke around about the day. We meet a friend of Richard's on the train, too, and somehow start brainstorming about the deck that every Magic player secretly wants to build. It's the Uncle Istvan/ Little Girl theme deck. It goes like this (mana base not included):
4 Little Girl
1 Uncle Istvan
1 Time of Need
1 Bone Flute
4 Shackles
1 Torture Chamber
1 The Rack
1 Iron Maiden
1 Bullwhip
...
You can see where this is going, and you can certainly fill the rest of the deck according to personal taste. You can dip into black for Dark or Cabal Rituals, or expand the artifact theme with Helm of Possession and the like. Use your imagination, although when you reach Blood Rites, or even worse, Dwarven Song (don't ask), you better stop!
Anyway, we have fun on the train and finally get back and enter Rudy's room. That's not as easy as it sounds. There is a steep and narrow staircase leading up to the room, which I have dubbed "Rudy's Abyss". Behold the pitfalls of drunkenness (I wasn't drunk, otherwise I couldn't have managed these stairs):
And this is the room that goes with it, one part of it, anyway:
On the left, that's Rudy, on the right, that's Michael. Behind those panels on the right is Rudy's Abyss!We drink some beers and play some Type 4, where I get to improve my stack by removing lots of crappy cards and putting powerful ones in instead. We check on the PT: LA and SCG: Chicago results and finally go to bed to take the 6:50 hours ride back to Berlin next morning.
There are a couple of story tidbits left to tell from the day before: Rudy judged a 1000-Euro-Sealed tournament where we others played in, finishing 17th (Michael) and 22nd (me). After that, in the evening, Pyromaniac and Bigmac participated in the most awesome Sealed tournament ever: the "Blast from the Past"-tournament. For about 200 Euros, you can build a sealed deck from a Revised starter and one booster of each Arabian Nights, Antiquities and Legends. Two The Abyss were opened and Bigmac hit a Library of Alexandria. This is him happily presenting for the camera:
Happiness is just a lucky pull away!That is my story from the weekend (told slightly fragmented here) which was great overall and even in detail. I had a blast going there, and big thanks to Rudy for giving us some floor space to crash on and breakfast and everything! Oh yeah, and the Spellenspektakel itself (the game fair where the tournament was held) was nice, too. I saw some guys practicing for the Rubik Cube Championships, who finished their standard cubes in just under 13 seconds and moved their fingers at a speed close to blurring, and I found a board game that is called "Holland". It has little windmills and you have to win your land from the water around it... just like the real thing!
Thanks for reading,
Dozer
Props:
- paying for the tournament and getting fair entry for free
- the organizers and judges, good job!
- Oliver Daems for showing up, finishing 4-3-1 and bitching like a professional entertainer all day
- the dice vendor I asked about one of my dice. He immediately detailed the manufacturer and series, pointed out the specialty of the hue and told me I likely own a discontinued Adonis or MJ2 Yellow + Light Blue. Awesome!
Slops:
- the prize structure. In addition to the prizes shown above, the T8 each got 24 boosters. Those packs should have gone to the Top 16, to compensate all the 6-1-1's that didn't make it in
- the venue was a little too small and the lighting was annoying
- Lennart, for not showing up – wtf happened?
In case you were wondering, yes, there is no picture of me up there.
