T1 Champs -- Winter ('Tog) beats Stoots (Vengeur)

[Rakso]

Discuss. Decklists to follow.

ICT goes 1-2, droooooooooooooop.

Who misspells my last name?  Some teammate
-CrazyCarl
\n\n

[Tron]

Congratulations to C4rl.  

I laugh at Roy.

What did he win as prize?    

[Rakso]

I think it was something like five boxes and savage bragging rights.

[Azhrei]

The t8 was actually really balanced: 1 Hulk, 1 Masque, 1 Mask, 2 Stax, 1 Dragon, 1 Sligh, 1 Bargain.

Of course, Hulk is so very, very painfully superior to all other decks.

Hey... any other teams place 75% of attending members in the top eight, and 50% of members in the finals?    

GO PARAGONS!!!!!!!!!

     

From the Paragons archive, June 18th:

"This is further support of my belief that Stax, Hulk, and Masque are the viable
decks. Mask/Masque
and Stax are the only decks that can lock a game up fast enough to win before
Hulk outdraws by
10-1. Workshop, Mask, and Psychatog are the backbone of the top tier."

And 5 of the t8. We had this metagame perfectly scouted.

[Toast]

congrats carl

[K-Run]

Congrats to Carl, the savage miser. That match reporting error did paid off!  

Congrats to TripleS, my fellow Candandian Shock_Wave, and to all the other players who did well.

I'm definitely happy about the top 8 : shows that T1 is rather healthy.

[Hyperion]

I tried to post this earlier, but couldn't for some reason.

Top 8 Decklists

The most interesting thing I found with the Top 8 decklists was the noticeable combo flavor in each and every one of these decks, even if they aren't classified as combo decks in of themselves (i.e., the Goblin Sligh deck, which would be considered a more combo-oriented Sligh deck, especially with his use of Lackey/Siege-Gang Commander to combat Stax).

The prediction was made a while back that GenCon would pit all the combo decks against each other, and that the best combo deck would survive while the others fell by the wayside. Either that, or we would have a format where multiple combo decks could be viable.

The Top 8 decklists show representation of multiple viable combo decks, and may indicate that they can keep each other in check for the time being.

However, I was surprised that no Keeper decks made the T8, especially considering that it was the most played deck at the tournament (even beating out Sligh!)

[Smmenen]

I agree - our metagame is appears balanced right now.  Yay!

Steve

[Rakso]

Not so fast... let's look at combos for a few more weeks. I still don't want to write them off considering they have their random (not necessarily broken, take note) moments.

[dicemanX]

Isn't this just one tournament out of seven at GenCon? Does anyone know how big the other tournaments are, or who T8/won?

[Rebel428]

Quote
4th Place: Richard Mattiuzzo, Animate Dragon
     l
     l
    V
2 Ancestral Recall

I HOPE that's a typo.

Anyway, congratulations Carl and everyone else in T8.

[dicemanX]

Thats just his secret tech. Control is a tough match-up, so it makes sense to try to sneak in some additional cheap card drawing early before the massive draw engine kicks in.

[Mellow D]

I haven't been here in awhile, but I just saw the results.  Just wanted to say, congrats Carl!  Score five for TMD.

Edit:  I stand corrected.  Thanks, Zherbus.

[Zherbus]

Score 5 for TMD (CrazyCarl, Triple_S, ShockWave, Thorme, Cha1n5) 2 for Team Meandeck, and 3 for Team Paragons!

[MoreFling]

Tog + Ninja skills is a deadly combo

Quote After a brief martial arts display by Carl, who displayed his eye of the dragon and sho dun wun fighting style,

Congrats Carl.

[suicide_slushy]

Huge congrats to everyone that did well.  I knew TMD would mise this tournament!
     

[Sylvester]

Congrats everyone, hope you had fun!

[Moxlotus]

Nice job to all the TMDers that did well that tourney.   I unfortunately crapped out in this tourney, but oh well. And to be fair to Roy, ICT (aka-bloodmoon.dec) did make T8 in the $250 tourney-but was killed in the T8 by a SPIRIT MONGER!!!!!! Not quite   but close

[Ruboonia]

Quote (Moxlotus @ July 28 2003,00:01)And to be fair to Roy, ICT (aka-bloodmoon.dec) did make T8 in the $250 tourney-but was killed in the T8 by a SPIRIT MONGER!!!!!! Not quite   but close

Any word on the t8 at the $250 tournament?  I left after my 13th place finish in the t1 champs to get some sleep...missing the $250 tournament in the process.

[Moxlotus]

I remember (not much because i was it was ending at about 10 in the morning...12 hours after start time) it included:
2 hulk
ICT
void? black discard w/ deed and calls is all i saw
sligh vairnat
a few various combo decks.

I can't really remember much else about that tournament-except the free flying twinkies  

[ZoneSeek]

Go beer drinking Japanese guys! err ... Ruboonia.

Oh, and I wish I could have been #3 on Mean-Deck but lord knows I would scrub out with Fish. Couldn't mise a svg borrow or anything locally and I had to work - but oh well.

Go Mean-Deck, Go Paragons! XD and most importantly, Go Boobies dot jiff!

[Rakso]

I think Josh Reynolds had to play against teammates in the Championship (like Carl) and just decided to win the side T1 tourney instead.

[BigChuck]

You do realize its Winter, not Winters right? Of course you did.

[SliverKing]

That is correct, we had some team-mirror pairings in the early rounds (out of 183 people!!! HORSESHIT!!) which pushed me just out of top8 contention (I clawed back tot he top table before running out of time against Giovanni and his mask deck in the last round).  With those poor pairings I decided to forgo sleep and stay up ALL NIGHT for the $250 tournament.   I tore the swiss up with Hulk, going  6-0, losing 1 game.  Draw into t8 with partner PhantomTapeWorm; Go broken through the quarter and semi-finals; to finals where I wait for PhantomTapeWorm to meet me, we collect our 250$ and call it a day.

I'll have lots and lots to say later, with regard to meeting all the awesome TMD people (MoxLotus, Giovanni, Grand Inquistor, dozens and dozens of others, SOME OF THEM EVEN REMEMBERD MY STP DECK!!!), the whole Paragon domination of GENCON, a hilarious deck I used on Friday to throw people off, some generic magic commentary, etc... but right now I need to sleep, since my vengeance tournament means I havent slept since Friday.

[Ruboonia]

Quote (ZoneSeek @ July 28 2003,00:22)Go beer drinking Japanese guys! err ... Ruboonia.

Haha, thanks!  I played a deck called "The Showercap", designed my Milton and me.  It absolutely crushes stax, and has a buttload of other favorable matchups, making it a great play at GenCon.

Magic is a game of luck, and if you don't have enough, you're not going to win no matter how good you are.  My two losses were to I@n (Goblin Sligh) and Shane (Vengeur Masque).  I had to paris down to 6/5 at least once in both of my losses...often times taking suboptimal hands hoping to draw mana sources.  Going lower than 5 isn't going to win you any games.   Both of them advanced to the t8...which assisted my already incredible tiebreakers.

It would have been VERY interesting to have seen The Showercap in the t8...

[herby]

ruboonia and i also placed top 32 to recieve prizes.

team showercap!!!!

[Gabethebabe]

Congrats to Carl! An AWESOME victory!

[CrazyCarl]

Thanks everyone for the support and the props.  There's one thing I'd like to get out there for those who haven't heard(or know but haven't said anything just yet).

Round 2 playing against Marc(PhantomTapeWorm), I was disappointed to have to play a Hulk Mirror, but I was cool knowing at least one of us would go on further, and the other would still be alive if they won out.  Long story short, Marc owned me in two straight games(Hulk comes down to the luck of the draw, and despite my best efforts, his solid play and the cards he drew took it home).

Yes, I lost round 2 yet managed to not "lose" a match the entire tourney.  How is this?  In my slight disappointment and haste I filled out the match result slip 2-0 in my favor.  It was completely unintentional and I would never do any such thing with the intent of deceiving someone(especially someone I'd like to be able to count as a friend).  We both signed the slip and Marc went off to drop off the slip while I watched some matches and planned on winning out the rest of the day(wouldn't be that hard I figured, Hulk is insane like that).

A little while later, Marc comes up to me and informs me the match result slip has been misfilled.  I look at him with what I would guess was a look of total misbelief.  He told me I had filled out the result slip wrong.  I asked him a few times just to make sure what I was hearing was right because I just couldn't believe it.  He sits down looking very cresfallen and I suggest we both go up.  The TO wouldn't allow him to have the results changed, and I knew of the policy(I thought it was DCI, it was actually PES policy) that signed match result slips can't be changed.  This made me feel absolutely horrible and I HOPED that somehow by me going up and asking them to change it, they would.  So we go up, and I end up basically begging the TO and the HJ to change the slip, but they refuse(the TO because of PES policy and Matt because he didn't want to get into conflict with PES).

I understood their position but it didn't make either of us feel better.  We both kind of go off and chat for a while with random people while I tell people how awful I feel.  This gives me an idea, so I go up to Marc and tell him that, should I win prizes, I will give him 20% of the product(cash, whatever) that I win, and he says it's unnecissary, but appreciates the sentiment regardless.

So basically he ends up with a box in addition to what he won in the $250 along with Josh(congrats guys), and we're cool, so it all "worked out" in the end.

I'm VERY confident I'd have been able to win out the rest of the day, but I had to go through the tournament with the feeling of being tainted, and it was really rough.  The understanding of everyone involved however made it easier to deal with(I know most people are like, who cares, you won an  assload of shit!  I was in it for the title and the art, so my goals were affected here which sucked).  But everything is cool now, I just wanted it out in the open for all who might hear misinformation and think otherwise.

Oh yeah, and I am still getting a painting, but it's not done and comes in the mail in a few weeks.  Myself and Shane agreed that the loser of our match would recieve the sketch so as to not walk away "empty handed", if you can call 3 boxes and a half box of Italian Legends "empty handed" .

[LordLamneth]

Either way, congratulations, Carl!

LordLamneth

[Rakso]

It still boggles me though how you could have so many Hulk mirrors in the Swiss when Hulk was only 8 out of 183 decks.