Tournament Report - Adventurer's Guild 10-26-07

[Mr. Type 4]

My friend Brian Keil won this tournament and would like to post his report but can't start threads.  So I made this for him.  Stay tuned!

[RitNecroWin]

Hello All:
I haven't been involved in the Magic community for a couple of years, but I've recently began playing vintage again.
Paul Mastriano and I playtest quite frequently. Paul, Josh and Justin Morford have been working on some combo decks as of late. I was out of the loop with testing the week before this tournie, so without playtesting with Lorwyn, I wanted to play something I felt comfortable with.
Finally, after much thought, I decided to let my coworker decide what I would play based on showing her pictures. She has no idea how the game works and I showed her Ninja of Deep Hours (I love URBana) and Ichorid. She said play that one "Ichorid" because it looks more like Halloween!
That settled it.
After much thought, Ichorid was the perfect choice. I had a feeling the field would shift with Lorwyn legal for this event. I expected to see Stax with 9sphere and a lot of GAT running ponder.
So the night before the event, I put together, what I feel, the most streamlined version of Ichorid.---
 
Happy Halloween
4x Golagari Grave Troll                                    Sideboard
4x Ichorid                                                     4x Emerald Charm
4x Stinkweed Imp                                          4x Reverant Silence
4x Golgari Thug                                             4x Contagion
2x Cephalid Sage                                            3x Bayou
2x Flame-kin zealot
4x Narcoameba
4x Serum Powder
4x Chalice of the Void
4x Bridge from Below
4x Leyline of the Void
4x Cabal Therepy
4x Unmask
4x Bazaar of Baghdad
4x Dryad Arbor
4x Dread Return

Paul, the Morfords and me showed up Saturday in time for registration.
I did my best to make sure everyone thought I was playing URBana. It helped that my deckbox had a sticker on it that read Urbanafish! I figured I could win a game or two on the suprise factor alone.

Game 1 (I apologize, I don't remember names, as I left my notes at home and I am writing this at work)
We shake hands and I win the die roll
I open with Bazaar, activate
Play unmask... take something silly (I think FOW)
play chalice 0
---He says at this point "Urbana w/ bazaar? Weird"
He goes, does nothing relevant
I dredge, dredge, dredge
Win
Game 2
I side out 4x Chalice 4x Leyline 2x Unmask 2x Thug +Bayous +Charms +silence
He opens with double leyline
I play bayou and silence, he FoWs.. I then play charm... down 1 leyline
He plays land
I topdeck charm, play charm... drop bazaar and go
He merchant scrolls for echoing truth
I cabal therepy and kill him
--- I still am unsure of what he was playing. I assume it was empty combo?

Round 2 Justin Morford playing Tendrills combo
I really didn't want to play this game. I hate facing friends, especially ones that drove.
game 1
I crush him super fast game one
game 2
I side same as before: He combos out with no leyline on board.
game 3
No leyline... I start dredging
I unmask his hand and take mana crypt, which really slows him down.
He reaches a point where he can hardcast Leyline or play wheel. Wheel makes me have a CRAZY yard. He plays Leyline. I'm holidng silence with a bayou. I win

I IDed the next 2 and go straight to top 8

Round  5 Brian playing ??? Top 8

game 1 He opens with Leyline... I scoop

game 2
Same, but I have the hate package...
Sience the leyline, charm my bazaar and I'm there..
game 3
Im not sure what all happened, but it was intense... He had leyline.
He played a tarmogoyf and started railing on me.
I kept digging with bazaar for answers.. all the while unmasking and taking counters.
Finally, I get charm and cast it.. As I did, I crossed my fingers and put my head down fulling expecting to hear countered. When he said "OK" I started dancing in my chair and laughing!

Round 6 Stax
Irrelavant.. Stax rolls over to Ichorid!

The finals was me and Josh and we worked that all out.

All in all, it was a great day. The tournie was a lot of fun. Mad props to Sean for keeping good on the prizes. The turnout was much lower than we expected.
I can't wait to see the pictures and decklists!

Props:
Mastriano, Morfords for keeping me on my game and driving!
Sean for organizing a cool event
Emerald charm and bayou for being stupid in this deck!
Tamara for picking Ichorid to play!

Slops:
The guy playing tundra wolves?... Why would anyone EVER play that?!
The dealer: for offering us 75$ for a mox and LOA

[Mr. Type 4]

nice report Brian - short and sweet, just like your tournament experience here. 

Ichorid goes undefeated - what does that say about the current state of the game?

[meadbert]

Ichorid goes undefeated - what does that say about the current state of the game?

Ichorid is outrageously good right now.  I was two fisted testing the other day and this is how a round played out.  The opposing deck was Plagiarize.dec so it is not a "Real" deck but it had insane hands both games and still managed to lose.

Game 1 Ichorid is on the draw
Opponent opens with Underground, Crypt, Lotus, Thirst, Thirst (pitching Baubles) and plays another Bauble.
Ichorid plays 0 disruption on turn 1 but discards dredgers and Bazaars into second Bazaar.
Turn 2 Plagiarize Plays Ancestral, Yawg, Tinker, Time Walk and replays like 3-4 Baubles.  After swinging for 11 Plagiarize passes the turn and draws up to either 10 or 11 cards during Ichorid's upkeep.  Any other deck would be dead in the water right here.  Plagiarize has triple counter backup and a vey strong board position.
From here Ichorid uses the 2 Bazaars to flash back 3 Therapies pulling all counter magic and then Dread Returns Ancestor's Chosen to gain 30 life and then wins the following turn at something like 68 life.

Game 2:  Plagiarize keeps opening hand that inlcludes 3x Leyline (2 Void, 1 Singularity) and 2xForce.  Plagiarize only drops the Voids since Singularity would cause Voids to cancel each other out.
Ichorid opens up by destroying a Leyline so Plagiarize hardcast sSingularity.  From there Ichorid repeatedly hardcasts Imps, Thugs and Narcomoebas basically keeping 1 of each on the board at all times.  Swinging for 2 or 3 a turn Ichorid is able to win the game.  Not fair!
I think Ichorid sat on Chain of Vapor in case of Tinker the last few turns.

Beating Ichorid requires the proper mix of a clock and control.  It is very tough.  Game 3 Plagiarize.dec was able to win thanks to turn 1 Pithing Needle naming Bazaar (on the play).  Then turn 2 Mystical found Tinker for DSC and Ichorid either did not have Chain or Plagiarize had Force backup. I forget.

[Midknight]

I am the guy, you played in the top 4 playing 5 color stax. This was by far the easiest tourament to top 8 in, for a Mox as the prize. There were only 16 people playing in it, and four of them were from State College playing very bad decks. With the terible attendance, im not sure if theres going to be anymore at this location, I can only hope.

You sure did smash me in with Ichrid, in the top four first game. Thanks for the lackey and the wheel of fortune for just conceding the second game, the odds get alittle better for me after sb, but I probably only had, maybe a 5-10 percent chance on winning the next two. I would have had to rely on wastedlands and tormods crypt recursion with welder to have any chance. I wasnt excepting to see ichrid there so I ran zero Leylines, which was a huge mistake.

Well Congrags on the excellent finish.

[Dante]

nice report Brian - short and sweet, just like your tournament experience here. 

Ichorid goes undefeated - what does that say about the current state of the game?

Let's not draw too much here for a top 2 in a 16-person event - he really won 4 matches all day (2-0 then 2 IDs, then 2 wins and a split in the top 2) and the top 4 opponent wasn't expecting Ichorid and didn't have a sideboard.

That being said, it's a contender and can definitely roll.

[RitNecroWin]

Agreed, with the above. Getting to the top 8 was absolute cake. However, it turned into some hardcore vintage there. I only played games in the top 8 and stax was unprepared. Ichorid is a very resilient deck, it was amazing how many hate packages I broke through on the day. If I was walking into a tournament with a better meta, I would have NEVER played this deck. It is very mechanical, and you play in your own bubble. I expected VERY limited hate as Lorwyn was legal. I truly assumed to see more thorns. Not only that, I expected to see more players. I did only have to play 4 real games all day. Which is better than some that had to play 2. One guy was paired against the Noobs from Pennstate 2 rounds straight (they were playing mono green, and a white deck sporting tundra wolves.) He essentially started in the top 8. --- By the way, I appreciated the conceded game. I knew you didn't have a board and it helped us get on the road much sooner. At least you got more out of it than you would have.

[MISTERTREK]

Wow, there seems to be a lot of bashing on the guys playing the green and white decks. Let's not discourage new players! We were all once beginners in the format. Did anybody perhaps talk with them and ENCOURAGE them how to improve in the format? I hate to see the format lose players that are trying to get involved. I would have loved to have played myself, but my partner got sick on Thursday, get well Jason!

I too was disapointed by the turn out. I was one of the dealers (I did offer $175 for the Jet only, I think that Shawn the other dealer was just trying to sell off his collection and not really wanting to buy anything). Perhaps it was states, perhaps the crappy early morning weather, not sure.

Let's hope that things look better in the future. My Blue Bell events will return in January! Hope to see you then.

[Sage]

I would have to agree with MISTERTREK in that there has been a bit too much bashing of the new players here.  I did in fact play one these guys and did offer up some valuable advice.  After seeing his cards, I don't think he knew that proxies were allowed.  If we want to have more tournaments in this location, encouraging newcomers to attend and giving them advice is probably a good idea.

Other than attendance, I was very pleased with this tournament.  All of the players were quite pollite (at least the ones I played) and made for a very enjoyable experience.  I in fact played MidKnight in the first round of T8 and was completely schooled by first turn Sphere of Resistance BOTH games.  If the T8 would have paired differently, I may have done much better.  Good games MidKnight!!   

I hope to see T8 decklists soon!!!!