Hi, I'm the guy who played Grow on Sunday so I thought I'd throw up a quick report. I was going to play Emerald Alice but after a few playtest games I wanted to take out a couple mana sources and add Ophidians. That pretty much left me with Pat Chapin's version of Grow so I just used that. However, I noticed I was getting reemed by Suicide and other random aggro decks (like my brother's OBC birds deck). So I killed Chapin's
whole wish SB idea and went with a transformational one. Here's what I ended up with:
4 Dryad
4 Ophidian
1 Morphling (for an Opt)
4 FoW
4 MisD
2 Foil (a lot better than I thought)
2 Daze
1 Disrupt
1 Divert
4 Gush
4 Brainstorm
4 Sleight of Hand
2 Merchant Scroll
1 Ancestral Recall
2 Powder Keg (1 Regrowth, 1 Cunning Wish)
4 Land Grant
4 Tropical Island
4 Island
6 Mana Artifact (Chapin's list had no Jet, I trust him)
1 LoA
Hmm, that seems to be 59... if I come up with what #60 was by the end of this I'll let you know.
SB:
4 Oath
2 Blessing
1 Weaver
1 Feeder
3 Back to Basics
1 Tormod's Crypt
1 Fact or Fiction (I thought it would be too slow against aggro)
1 Timetwister
1 Powder Keg
So I bought the two Daze that I needed to fill out the decklist and I was off. I pulled the Elvish Ranger (pr0n) and bebe pulled a Disintigrate so we set off to round 1. I'm only going to talk about the major happenings of each game as that's all I remember.
Round 1: Paul (bebe) playing Land Grant Sligh.
He was also running Dryads which I thought was very cool. We play every tournament and all our games are always very interesting and fun, as well as close.
Game 1: He just rolls over me in about 3 minutes.
Game 2: I drop Oath turn 2 which catches him Hull Breachless and with a creature on the table. I win about 45 mins later as he has a rather large Dryad out that makes me afraid so I played it safe. I eventually find a Keg and fly over with a Morphling.
Game 3: This game never really starts as we run out of time and go into extra turns very early on. Bebe has a creature out and I have an Oathed up Weaver. We won't finish in 5 turns so Bebe concedes to me. This was extremely nice of him, he said he had all the cards he needed so he wasn't too worried about the prize and he just came to play. Like usual we had some very good games.
2-1, 1-0
Round 2: Peter playing Dragon.
Check out his above report. Let's just say that it takes a lot of will power to keep 6 mana open with this deck.
1-1-1, 1-0-1
Round 3: Richard (Shock Wave?) playing UW control. He plays maindeck Moat and StP which are very disagreeable to me.
Game 1: I blow my hand in the first couple turns with pitch counters and for some reason this doesn't net me an Ophidian or Dryad. He's been hitting me with a Mishra then drops Morph.
Game 2 & 3: These games have blurred together in my mind so I'll just list events I remember from either of these games:
- I lock him out both games with BtB. Game 2 he sided out his Aura Fracture, game 3 he sided them back in but by the time he found it, the game was as good as over and I just let it hit. He had out at most 1 plain, 1 island and a Sol Ring.
- I cast a Timetwister while I'm holding 6 cards and he's holding 5. I'm either a bad player or I was holding 3 Land Grant and an Island.
- I "lose" a counter-war letting him get a second Keg into play knowing that he has to blow his first Keg at 2 in order to live. I also know that he doesn't know he'll lose both his Kegs.
- Watching him shrink to about 3 inches tall after pointing this out
. We both agreed after that this cost him whatever game this was.
- Him blocking my two Ophidians with 2 Mishras and a Sol Ring while under BtB over and over and over. These were his only two mana sources so he was loathe to pump them to take out a Phid.
- Him at 6 life and me with a 4/4 Dryad out. I topdecked a Mox Ruby for the win.
- I may have tried to throw the game away by Foil'ing the Ruby then MisD'ing the Foil, emptying my hand and pumping the Dryad to 6/6. He had a Plains untapped. He also had cards in his hand. None of aforementioned cards were StP.
Those last two games were very close and tense, well played on both sides I think except for that one little mistake with the Keg on Shock Wave's part which turned the game in my favour.
2-1, 2-0-1
Somewhere around here I convinced Lam that I was playing Oath with a Grow SB.
Round 4: Jon playing UGW zoo'ish type thing. Jon was playing what I believe was a type 2 deck with the 12 appropriate duals topped with a smattering of random restricted cards like Sol Ring and Stroke.
Game 1: I made a pretty bad mistake here because I wasn't familiar with my deck at all. He had two Call tokens out and a Mongrel with one card in hand and I had a 8/8 Dryad. He was at 7 life. My mistake was attacking, he chumped with everything and pitched his last card to the Mongrel. This left him with a 3/3 elephant, one more to flash back next turn, and me with a 1/3 Ophidian. Usually a 3 for 1 trade is a good thing, but the only way I can deal with creatures is by giant Dryads and 2 Kegs (one was in my graveyard). I dug for the last Keg, found it, cleared the board of elephants and went in with Phid.
In the middle of game 1 and 2 Jon turned and asked his friend, who had been watching, for SB help. I figured Jon was new to tourney magic as he played out his cards before asking about mulligans and had to read most of my cards, etc, etc. I figured he didn't know that asking other people for SB help was a big no-no, so I let it go.
Game 2: I didn't side in the Oath engine, so I kept creatures off the table with counters and Kegs and killed with a big Dryad while locking him out with BtB.
We played a fun game after this and he just rolled over me with elephants and dogs and bears.
2-0, 3-0-1
Three of us are 3-0-1, myself, Lam's friend Rob who is at his first type 1 tournament and is fairly new to magic, piloting the only SuiBlack deck, and the man himself, undefeated in games and matches, Lam... cut to top 8.
Arend playing Lam.dec.. uh, I mean mono-U. Arend is running BtB main over Mishras.
Game 1: We both drop our hands to pitch counters early game and both of us only have lands out. I topdeck a Lotus and drop Morph.
Game 2: This game goes like it should against mono-U. I drop a Dryad, out pitch-counter to protect it and ride it to victory. He goes: 20, 19, 18, 16, 12, 8, 0.
Phew, Arend's only loss up to that point was to Lam.
Top 4: Lam playing Lam.dec.
Game 1: I win the die roll and go land, Mox, Lotus, Dryad, sac Lotus, brainstorm (2/2) then Time Walk (3/3). Untap, Sleight of Hand (4/4) and attack. Eventually Lam kills it with a Keg but not before he's down to 3 life. I drop the other Dryad I'd been holding, attack once putting him at 2 life then next turn Brainstorm for the win. By the way, Time Walk was card #60.
Game 2: Lam plays Island and says go. I play Tropical and Sleight of Hand, he Disrupts it, I Daze back, he says okay, Sleight is good. Then says he forgot to draw off his Disrupt and does so. I say that he doesn't draw as it was countered and he realizes his mistake. I told him that I thought that drawing an extra card results in a game loss (this has been told to me a number of times, including a level 3 judge at Nationals who said that drawing extra cards is a game loss at any rule enforcement level, even casual REL1 used for friday night magic.) So we call Leon over and deliberate for a while. Leon goes and checks something, comes back and says he agrees with me, that this should be a game loss. Not exactly the way I wanted to win but I try to follow the rules strictly and would expect a game loss if the roles were reversed and I drew the extra card. I talked with Lam after and he said no hard feelings and nothing personal, which was very cool of him, and I felt the same way. I think Lam is a good guy and a very good magic player. He didn't win four in a row because he was lucky, no matter what anyone else says. So I finally ended Lam's reign of terror*.
*not really.
2-0, 4-0-1
Anti-climax.
Finals against Rob playing SuiBlack.
Game 1: He rolls over me like my testing showed he should.
Game 2: I drop Oath second turn while he had two creatures out. About 30 minutes later I won with a Morphling with Lam pleeding for Rob to concede the whole time. Rob had never seen Oath before and wanted to see exactly how a Spike Feeder was going to kill him, I don't blame him, I wouldn't buy it the first time either.
Game 3: For double the marbles.
Him - Wasteland
Me - Tropical Island, wasted, I Sleight of Hand into another Tropical.
Him - Wasteland
Me - Tropical Island, wasted, Land Grant for another Tropical.
Him - Wasteland
Me - Tropical Island, wasted, Brainstorm into...... no land.
Him - Swamp, Ritual, I FoW'd the Ritual.
Me - Draw go.
Him - Swamp, Ritual, Negator.
Game over...
I needed one of those lands to be basic, or have a basic forest in my deck to Land Grant for so I could have played the Oath off a Mox. He totally wrecked me that game, Duressing my Oath and Sinkholing my last land after the game ended.. I mean after he did the swamp-ritual-negator combo.
1-2, 4-1-1
So the deck did pretty well, my only change would be to add a basic Forest for the Library of Alexandria which was mostly useless. With the $100 in trade I got for second prize I nabbed the beat up Timetwister. All in all a good day. Thanks again to Leon for hosting another great tournament and everyone else for setting it up and for my brother for not having a good deck to play and lending me his power.
chad
