Format was 5 round swiss, cut to T8. Ran by paper in slightly weird format. $20 entry, Emerald goes to 1st with store credit to 2nd and 3rd. Somewhere between 20-25 people, moderate power level (10 proxy) with a decent mix of well played ‘random’ decks played by some damn good players. The deck I played:
Draw-7.dec version X by Team DD
1 Burning Wish
1 Tolarian Academy
2 Glimmervoid
4 Gemstone Mine
4 City of Brass
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Emerald
1 Sol Ring
1 Mana Vault
1 Mana Crypt
1 Lotus Petal
1 Lion's Eye Diamond
1 Black Lotus
4 Dark Ritual
1 Chrome Mox
1 Mox Diamond
2 Elvish Spirit Guide
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Fastbond
1 Crop Rotation
1 Windfall
1 Tinker
1 Timetwister
1 Mind's Desire
2 Hurkyl's Recall
4 Force of Will
3 Diminishing Returns
4 Brainstorm
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Yawgmoth's Will
1 Yawgmoth's Bargain
1 Vampiric Tutor
2 Tendrils of Agony
1 Necropotence
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Memory Jar
SB: 4 Xantid Swarm
SB: 2 Oxidize
SB: 2 Hurkyl's Recall
SB: 1 Diminishing Returns
SB: 1 Tendrils of Agony
SB: 1 Gaea's Blessing
SB: 2 Chain of Vapor
SB: 1 Balance
SB: 1 Duress
Round 1: Some guy with Shared Fate.decHe had a pretty nice build, jammed to the ass with counters and discard (maindeck Forces, Duress, Hymn to Tourach, etc) which really sucked.
Game 1: I combo out, playing 5 Draw-7s including 3 Diminishing Returns. Each time I play Returns, I lost a win condition. First Burning Wish, then Tendrils #1, then, on the last Returns (storm count ~20 and tons of mana in the pool) the last card removed was none other than the final Tendrils. Scoop, etc. (even though, ironically, he plays no maindeck win conditions, he was smart enough to sit back and watch me deck myself, so there was no point in wasting more time).
Game 2 (board in 4x Swarm): I bait a counter, go off, etc.
Game 3: I get stalled a bit, and he gets out a Shared Fate. I laugh, as my combo piece in hand is none other than the non-card drawing bomb of Necropotence. We go for a couple turns as I assemble a winning hand. I’m stuck, when he decides to go for a Desire (courtesy of my deck) for 1, netting him a useless Serum Visions. With Desire in the yard, I proceed to go off with Will for a 12-spell Desire (again avoiding Shared Fate
) netting me Tendrils, win.
Games: 2-1, Matches 1-0, 2 points (They had a screwed up point system where you get 0 pts for 0-2, 1 pt for 1-2, 2 pts for 2-1, and 3 pts for 2-0).
Round 2, my brother with Zherbus Kaeper (Sans Mind Twist, FoF, etc)Game 1: I don’t remember, I win.
Game 2 (board in Swarms): I get screwed by crap draws off a first turn Necro. I’m sitting with a god-hand waiting for a second black source. I’m at 1 life, facing down an Angel, he’s at 18. He has a choice of popping his Lotus to play a Mox Monkey and eating my only 2 mana sources (leaving me with nothing in play except a useless Necro) or leaving Lotus and sitting on a Mana Drain. He goes with the former, allowing me dump a hand full of mana, Ancestral Recall into a second black source (Dark Rit) and Yawg Win. I Tendrils him for exactly his life total.
Games: 4-1, Matches 2-0, 5 points.
Round 3, guy I know from Game Universe packing U/G MadnessI know this guy from the other place, and his deck, despite being somewhat of a reputed budget deck is not only fully powered but pimped, too, and even unproxied.
Game 1: He counters my Fastbond, and I go off with Diminishing Returns into a hand perfectly engineered for a 20 point Tendrils.
Game 2 (board in Swarms): I’m all set to go off with a Timetwister with Force backup. The last two cards in his hand were the only 2-card combination in his deck that could possibly beat me, double Circular Logic (courtesy of Aquamoeba). I end up resolving another Draw-7 a bit later and stalling out. Eventually, I’m mana-screwed and utterly landless and scoop when he resolves a Null Rod, negating my last pair of Moxen.
Game 3 (board in pair of Chains of Vapor): We stall out, he counters a lot and my draws are bad. I’m manascrewed again (courtesy of no land and a Null Rod), and finally he swings with the army, tapping out for the Rootwallas with what he thinks is lethal damage. Unfortunately, he had miscalculated and I was left at 2. I topdeck. . . Tolarian Academy. Brainstorm nets me Chain of Vapor, Null Rod goes bye bye as I go wild and win. *A note* this was a horrific, mistake filled game for the both of us. The highlight was me tutoring for the wrong card (Timetwister instead of Lotus when I was blue mana-less) and him tapping out at the end with multiple Circular Logics in hand.
Games: 6-2, Matches: 3-0, 7 points.
Round 4, some guy with a brutal, discard-filled REANIMATORHe’s a cool guy, and plays an ostensibly terrible deck amazingly.
Game 1: I draw. . . no card-drawing. I mulligan. . .no mana. I mulligan again. . .nothing at all. I end up keeping a Mox and a couple draw-7s. He starts off by going Mox, land, Ritual, Hymn to Tourach (me left with 1 card in hand), Entomb, Reanimate Plated Slagwurm. I lose in short order.
Game 2 (uhh, what do you board in against Reanimator w/ Plated Slagwurm?): I draw. . .crap AGAIN. He is so nice that he lets me draw 7 on my mulligan. I keep an ok 2nd turn draw-7. I go land, pass. He goes Lotus, land, Duress (I Force to protect my solo Draw-7), Duress, Hymn. I’m left with quite little. I get some decent draws, but he reanimates an Akroma, putting me on a short clock. I eventually play a desperation Timetwister while at 6 life. Ironically enough, my Twister is proxied on an Unsummon, and he was scared because he thought that it actually
was an Unsummon, which would’ve actually done something against him. I get some mana, go for another tapped out Draw-7, and crap out. Impact courtesy of Angel, etc. *Insert a crap-load of angry smileys here* I’d just like to take this opportunity to say that I got the worst draws in this match that I’ve gotten in a loooooong time, and he got 2 consecutive god-hands. Eh, it happens.
Games: 6-4, Matches: 3-1, 7 points.
Round 5: some guy with mono-red artifact (like mono-R TNT)Again, an ostensibly random deck, but well built and well played.
Game 1: He drops a Welder, Karn (which manages to screw me out of 3 Moxen AND my Glimmervoid, all in 1 bloody turn), and a Juggernaut. I combo out inches ahead of the clock, going off at 1 life. I Twister into goodness, play out a hand of mana, then drop Memory Jar with a storm count of 15 and over 10 mana in my pool in all the right colors. I draw 6 mana and Vampiric FUCKING Tutor. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrGG
Game 2 (I board in the second pair of Hurkyl’s Recalls and my pair of Oxidizes): I have quite the godly hand with tons of mana and a hilariously sick second turn. He obviously doesn’t have counters or discard, and I know he doesn’t maindeck Trinispheres or Sphere of Resistances or anything, so I hold back my Lotus and Sol Ring for storm count, and go Land, Mox, go. What does he do? WORKSHOP, TRINIMOTHERFUCKINGFUCKSCOMBOU
PTHEASSSPHERE!!!!!!!!!!!(insert massive anger here). I have a bloody Oxidize in hand, with 2 mana. I then draw zero lands or ESGs in 5 turns and get run over by a pair of fatties. [massive section of angry ranting deleted]
Games: 6-6, Matches 3-2, 7 points.
Needed 9 points for T8, so I obviously didn’t make it. My brother (also 3-2) lost a tense 3rd game against Tog in round 5 due to horrific, land-filled, and threat-less topdecking, narrowly eliminating him from T8 with 8 points in a long and harrowing match. The Reanimator guy ended up in the Top 4 (I left during Top 4) and the U/G madness guy had just won game 1 in the Top 4 against Fish. The mono-R artifact guy from round 5 made Top 8, but lost against the Fish guy. The full Top 8 was: Reanimator, mono-R artifact, Fish, Dragon, U/G madness, Gro-a-Tog, and 2 other decks.
On a somewhat humorous aside, I was honestly planning on bring Salvagers, but the 4 Salvagers and 2 Trinket Mages are in the mail as we speak. I’ll be bringing it to the next Game Universe tourney (assuming they get here soon) and possibly the Library tournament Planet X has coming up some time. I might even bring back DDT Mask for a tourney or 2.
Props:Mike Sully, for being cool and playing with Death-Long, the third coolest combo deck in Type 1 (behind Draw-7 and Salvagers, of course ï?Š ).
Mike, again, for not killing anyone/breaking anything after a horrific mistake (forgot to put the Yawgmoth’s Will back in his board) cost him Round 5 and a Top-8 spot.
My bro, for getting the same record as me after getting annihilated in Round 2.
The store, obv.
Draw-7, for rocking and beating 3 consecutive decks packing Forces (the bane of my existence).
DDT Mask, for being a secret Mask deck I’m revamping for hopeful tournament viability.
Slops:Draw-7, for giving me a really shitty setup against the reanimator guy.
Discard spells, for being the one thing I wasn’t expecting in any shape or form.
Trinisphere, for rearing it’s ugly head when I least expected it.
Hurkyl’s Recall, for not being cast even ONCE the entire day, despite being golden during testing.
Food, for not being there when I was hungry.
-Dan
